The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Moby Dick; or The Whale Author: Herman Melville Last Updated: January 3, 2009 Posting Date: December 25, 2008 [ EBook # 2701 ] Release Date: June, 2001 Language: English *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE *** Produced by Daniel Lazarus and Jonesey MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE By Herman Melville Original Transcriber's Notes: This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg's archives. The proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text. In chapters 24, 89, and 90, we substituted a capital L for the symbol for the British pound, a unit of currency. ETYMOLOGY. (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School) The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his onetime lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his quondam grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality." While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true."--HACKLUYT" WHALE... . Sw. and Dan. HVAL. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. HVALT is arched or vaulted."--WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY" WHALE... . It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. WALLEN; A.S. WALW-IAN, to roll, to wallow."--RICHARDSON'S DICTIONARY KETOS, GREEK. CETUS, LATIN. WHOEL, ANGLO-SAXON. HVALT, DANISH. WAL, DUTCH. HWAL, SWEDISH. WHALE, ICELANDIC. WHALE, ENGLISH. BALEINE, FRENCH. BALLENA, SPANISH. PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, FEGEE. PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, ERROMANGOAN. EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian). It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a misfortunate devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the disorderly whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for bona_fide gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely worthful or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own. So fare thee well, inadequate devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sickly tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with total eyes and hollow glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness--Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together--there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! EXTRACTS." And God created smashing whales."--GENESIS." Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be hoary."--JOB." Now the Lord had prepared a keen fish to swallow up Jonah."--JONAH." There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein."--PSALMS." In that day, the Lord with his mad, and dandy, and substantial sword, shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea."--ISAIAH" And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster's mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that cruddy great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch."--HOLLAND'S PLUTARCH'S MORALS." The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the bighearted fishes that are: among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in length as four acres or arpens of land."--HOLLAND'S PLINY." Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a great many Whales and early monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the former, one was of a most grotesque size... . This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before him into a foam."--TOOKE'S LUCIAN. "THE TRUE HISTORY."" He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales, which had bones of very groovy value for their teeth, of which he brought some to the king... . The proficient whales were catched in his ain country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two days."--other OR other'S VERBAL NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN FROM HIS MOUTH BY KING ALFRED, A.D. 890." And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in with_child security, and there sleeps."--MONTAIGNE.--APOLOGY FOR RAIMOND SEBOND." Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan described by the imposing prophet Moses in the life of patient Job."--RABELAIS." This whale's liver was two cartloads."--STOWE'S ANNALS." The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan."--LORD BACON'S VERSION OF THE PSALMS." Touching that flagitious bulk of the whale or ork we have received nothing certain. They grow exceeding productive, insomuch that an unbelievable quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale."--IBID. "HISTORY OF LIFE AND DEATH."" The supreme thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise."--KING HENRY." Very like a whale."--HAMLET. "Which to secure, no skill of leach's art Mote him availle, but to returne againe To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart, Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine, Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine."--THE FAERIE QUEEN." Immense as whales, the motion of whose huge bodies can in a peaceful calm trouble the ocean til it boil."--SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. PREFACE TO GONDIBERT." What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the erudite Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit."--SIR T. BROWNE. OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE. VIDE HIS V. E. "Like Spencer's Talus with his modern flail He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.... Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears, And on his back a grove of pikes appears."--WALLER'S BATTLE OF THE SUMMER ISLANDS." By art is created that bang-up Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State--(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an unreal man."--OPENING SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN." Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the mouth of a whale."--PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. "That sea beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream."--PARADISE LOST.---" There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, in the deep Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea."--IBID." The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming in them."--FULLLER'S PROFANE AND HOLY STATE. "So close behind some promontory lie The huge Leviathan to attend their prey, And give no chance, but swallow in the fry, Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way."--DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS." While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water."--THOMAS EDGE'S TEN VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS." In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on their shoulders."--SIR T. HERBERT'S VOYAGES INTO ASIA AND AFRICA. HARRIS COLL." Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to proceed with a not_bad deal of caution for fear they should run their ship upon them."--SCHOUTEN'S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION." We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The Jonas-in-the-Whale... . Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but that is a fable... . They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains... . I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of herrings in his belly... . One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over."--A VOYAGE TO GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL." Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was informed), besides a huge quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren."--SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS." Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness."--RICHARD STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS. A.D. 1668." Whales in the sea God's voice obey."--N. E. PRIMER." We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the northward of us."--CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D. 1729."... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an unwarranted smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain."--ULLOA'S SOUTH AMERICA. "To l chosen sylphs of special note, We trust the important charge, the petticoat. Oft have we known that sevenfold fence to fail, Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale."--RAPE OF THE LOCK." If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the large fleshly in creation."--GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST." If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like heavy wales."--GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON." In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was found to be a utter whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us."--COOK'S VOYAGES." The expectant whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so big dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to terrify and prevent their too near approach."--UNO VON TROIL'S LETTERS ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772." The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce animal, and requires huge address and boldness in the fishermen."--THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778." And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?"--EDMUND BURKE'S REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-FISHERY." Spain--a not_bad whale stranded on the shores of Europe."--EDMUND BURKE. (SOMEWHERE. )" A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates and robbers, is the right to purple fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the king."--BLACKSTONE. "Soon to the sport of death the crews repair: Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends The barbed steel, and every turn attends."--FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK. "Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires, And rockets blew self driven, To hang their momentary fire Around the vault of heaven. "So fire with water to compare, The ocean serves on in_high_spirits, Up-spouted by a whale in air, To express unwieldy joy."--COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S VISIT TO LONDON." Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a stroke, with immense velocity."--JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A SMALL SIZED ONE. )" The aorta of a whale is large in the bore than the independent pipe of the water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing from the whale's heart."--PALEY'S THEOLOGY." The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet."--BARON CUVIER." In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any till the beginning of May, the sea being then covered with them."--COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI WHALE FISHERY. "In the free element beneath me swam, Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle, Fishes of every colour, form, and kind; Which language cannot paint, and mariner Had never seen; from dread Leviathan To insect millions peopling every wave: Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands, Led by mystic instincts through that waste And trackless region, though on every side Assaulted by rapacious enemies, Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw, With swords, saws, coiling horns, or hooked fangs."--MONTGOMERY'S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD. "Io! Paean! Io! sing. To the finny people's king. Not a mighty whale than this In the immense Atlantic is; Not a fatter fish than he, Flounders round the Polar Sea."--CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE." In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each early, when one observed: there--pointing to the sea--is a dark-green pasture where our children's grand-children will go for bread."--OBED MACY'S HISTORY OF NANTUCKET." I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones."--HAWTHORNE'S TWICE TOLD TALES." She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago."--IBID." No, Sir,'t is a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!"--COOPER'S PILOT." The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had been introduced on the stage there."--ECKERMANN'S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE." My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have been stove by a whale."--" NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL. NEW YORK, 1821. "A mariner sat in the shrouds one night, The wind was piping loose; Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale, And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale, As it floundered in the sea."--ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH." The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six English miles... ." Sometimes the whale shakes its rattling tail in the air, which, cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles."--SCORESBY." Mad with the agonies he endures from these tonic attacks, the infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with broad expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with immense swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed... . It is a matter of large astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an sensual (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity among the legion, and many of them competent observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and the most commodious opportunities of witnessing their habitudes."--THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839." The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the most severe to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe."--FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, 1840. October 13. "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head. "Where away?" demanded the captain. "Three points off the lee bow, sir." "Raise up your wheel. Steady!" "Steady, sir." "Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?" "Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she breaches!" "Sing out! sing out every time!" "Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there--there--THAR she blows--bowes--bo-o-os!" "How far off?" "Two miles and a half." "Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands."--J. ROSS BROWNE'S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE. 1846." The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of Nantucket."--" NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS. A.D. 1828. Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the assault for some time with a lance; but the angered monster at length rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable."--MISSIONARY JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT." Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and peculiar portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to the National wealth by the bold and most persevering industry."--REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U. S. SENATE, ON THE APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET. 1828." The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment."--" THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S ADVENTURES AND THE WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE COMMODORE PREBLE." BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER." If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will send you to hell."--LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS BROTHER, WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER VERSION OF THE WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE." The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they failed of their primary object, laid-open the haunts of the whale."--MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY." These things are mutual; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West Passage."--FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED." It is out_of_the_question to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck by her near appearance. The vessel under brusque sail, with look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a totally different air from those engaged in unconstipated voyage."--CURRENTS AND WHALING. U.S. EX. EX." Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect having seen big curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales."--TALES OF A WHALE VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN." It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales, that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages enrolled among the crew."--NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND RETAKING OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK." It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels (American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they departed."--CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT." Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up perpendicularly into the air. It was the while."--MIRIAM COFFIN OR THE WHALE FISHERMAN." The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would manage a muscular unbroken colt, with the bare appliance of a rope tied to the root of his tail."--A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND TRUCKS." On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone's throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which the beech tree extended its branches."--DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST."'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the distended jaws of a expectant Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat, threatening it with inst destruction;--'Stern all, for your lives!'"--WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER." So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!"--NANTUCKET SONG. "Oh, the rare one-time Whale, mid storm and gale In his ocean home will be A gargantuan in might, where might is right, And King of the boundless sea."--WHALE SONG. CHAPTER 1. Loomings. Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing especial to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rearward of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a stiff moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high-pitched time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophic flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Amerind isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours late were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of deadly men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high-pitched aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the gullible fields gone? What do they here? But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extreme limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as near the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is wizard in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the languid, umbrageous, placid, most captivating bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into removed woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magical stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade ankle-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, calculated whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a prosaic trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust sizeable boy with a robust levelheaded soul in him, at some time or former crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when 1st told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the sure-enough Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a freestanding deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still recondite the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the primal to it all. Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow bleary about the eyes, and begin to be over witting of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do not enjoy themselves much, as a cosmopolitan thing;--no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honourable sizable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,--though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board--yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the erstwhile Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their Brobdingnagian bake-houses the pyramids. No, when I go to sea, I go as a uncomplicated sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at inaugural, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you come of an Old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tall boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a potent decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What of it, if some honest-to-god hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that previous hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the honest-to-god sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the like way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each early's shoulder-blades, and be content. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really rattling, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a moneyed man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more rife than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many early things, at the same time that the leaders little suspicious it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the inconspicuous police officer of the Fates, who has the perpetual surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a foresighted time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more blanket performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:" GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES." WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL." BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN." Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in in_high_spirits tragedies, and short and sluttish parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under versatile disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my ain unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment. Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the capital whale himself. Such a pompous and secret monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and remote seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With early men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail prohibited seas, and land on cruel coasts. Not ignoring what is near, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would they let me--since it is but well to be on well-disposed terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the gravid flood-gates of the wonder-world swung overt, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag. I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of sure-enough Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the niggling packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday. As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no former than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that illustrious old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her keen original--the Tyre of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those primeval whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventuresome little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones--so goes the story--to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were close enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit? Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and drab night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With nervous grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,--So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be certain to inquire the price, and don't be too particular. With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the brilliant red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn," there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the jam-packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the jellied frost lay ten inches thick in a severe, asphaltic pavement,--rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from tough, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most paltry plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the unsubtle glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the sleazy, if not the sunny inns. Such blue streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, all-inclusive building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The Crossed Harpoons," and "The Sword-Fish?"--this, then must needs be the sign of "The Trap." However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, upcountry door. It seemed the large Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a opprobrious Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of'The Trap!' Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a marvelous straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath--" The Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin." Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather sinister in that fussy connexion, thought I. But it is a unwashed name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so wispy, and the place, for the time, looked smooth enough, and the ramshackle little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the identical spot for cheap lodgings, and the good of pea coffee. It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended quondam house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a piercing bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about pitiful Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that wild wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose works I possess the sole copy extant--" it maketh a tremendous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the lone glazier." True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too tardy to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the raging Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my ain coals. But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his puritanical hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost? Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more grand than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the lukewarm tears of orphans. But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be. CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn. Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, humiliated, straggling entry with passee wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very magnanimous oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the inadequate crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and heedful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious youthful artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and sincere contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however waste, might not be altogether unwarranted. But what most puzzled and confounded you was a foresighted, limber, fateful, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three grim, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a spooky man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant. Ever and anon a shiny, but, alas, misleading idea would dart you through.--It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.--It's the unnatural combat of the four key elements.--It's a deuced heath.--It's a Hyperborean winter scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at final all these fancies yielded to that one foreboding something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a mammoth fish? even the expectant leviathan himself? In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a net theory of my ain, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many ripened persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a with_child hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone seeable; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the tremendous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads. The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathen array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what atrocious cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, l years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon--so like a corkscrew now--was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled total forty feet, and at concluding was found imbedded in the hump. Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut through what in old times must have been a keen fundamental chimney with fireplaces all round--you enter the public room. A still swart place is this, with such humbled ponderous beams above, and such former wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some sure-enough craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a prospicient, low, shelf-like table covered with wacky glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this broad world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den--the bar--a rude attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there stands the immense arcuate bone of the whale's jaw, so encompassing, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered honest-to-god man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though truthful cylinders without--within, the villanous fleeceable goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS a penny more; and so on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling. Upon entering the place I found a number of unseasoned seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of SKRIMSHANDER. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full--not a bed unoccupied." But avast," he added, tapping his forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing." I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly obnoxious, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so sulfurous a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man's blanket." I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?--you want supper? Supper'll be ready directly." I sat down on an sure-enough wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still farther adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under replete sail, but he didn't make much headway, I thought. At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland--no fire at all--the landlord said he couldn't afford it. Nothing but two dreary tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind--not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; secure heavens! dumplings for supper! One vernal fellow in a dark-green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner." My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty."" Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"" Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically rummy, "the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don't--he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes'em rare."" The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?"" He'll be here afore long," was the answer. I could not help it, but I began to feel shady of this "dark complexioned" harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did. Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on. Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, "That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the late news from the Feegees." A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung unresolved, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the initiative house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled minuscule honest-to-goodness Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how farseeing standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island. The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the staring topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously. I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the solid he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood wide-cut six feet in height, with baronial shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a vast favourite with them, they raised a cry of "Bulkington! Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of the house in pursuit of him. It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally restrained after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just old to the entrance of the seamen. No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a full deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your ain blanket, and sleep in your own skin. The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of sleeping with him. It was bonnie to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the healthy, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting previous, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?" Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't sleep with him. I'll try the bench here."" Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots and notches. "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's plane there in the bar--wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough." So saying he procured the plane; and with his honest-to-god silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at lowest the plane-iron came bump against an undestroyable knot. The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's sake to quit--the bed was cushy enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the big stove in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown study. I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too shortsighted; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow-minded, and the former bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one--so there was no yoking them. I then placed the maiden bench lengthwise along the only unmortgaged space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed a series of diminished whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night. The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I steal a march on him--bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no spoilt idea; but upon 2d thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down! Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I began to think that after all I might be cherishing insupportable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly just bedfellows after all--there's no telling. But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer." Landlord!" said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep such late hours?" It was now hard upon twelve o'clock. The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. "No," he answered, "generally he's an early bird--airley to bed and airley to rise--yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so recent, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."" Can't sell his head?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?" getting into a lofty rage. "Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?"" That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't sell it here, the market's overstocked."" With what?" shouted I." With heads to be certain; ain't there too many heads in the world?"" I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."" May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin' his head."" I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's." It's broke a'ready," said he." Broke," said I--" BROKE, do you mean?"" Sartain, and that's the selfsame reason he can't sell it, I guess."" Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow-storm--" landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the former half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an knowledgeable and confidential one in the high degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the initiative place, you will be so skilful as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if on-key I take to be ripe evidence that this harpooneer is sodding mad, and I've no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean, landlord, YOU, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to a deplorable prosecution."" Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be well-to-do, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of'balmed New Zealand heads (heavy curios, you know), and he's sold all on'em but one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to churches. He wanted to, final Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions." This account cleared up the otherwise unexplainable mystery, and showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me--but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?" Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a serious man."" He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "But come, it's getting dreadful belated, you had better be turning flukes--it's a squeamish bed; Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There's plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come along here, I'll give ye a glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed "I vum it's Sunday--you won't see that harpooneer to-night; he's come to anchor somewhere--come along then; DO come; WO N'T ye come?" I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered into a modest room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious bed, almost large enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast." There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; "there, make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye." I turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared. Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most refined, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a big seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of eccentric bone fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed. But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some acceptable conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a with_child door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an Amerindic moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be potential that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this occult harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck. I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very frigid now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer's not coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven. Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a skillful deal, and could not sleep for a tenacious time. At last I slid off into a lite doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a large footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of promiscuous come into the room from under the door. Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the demonic head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while employed in unlacing the bag's mouth. This accomplished, however, he turned round--when, practiced heavens! what a sight! such a face! It was of a colored, violet, jaundiced colour, here and there stuck over with declamatory blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a dread bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the swooning, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those contraband squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a bloodless man--a whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his remote voyages, must have met with a like adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man into a purple yellow one. However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the erstwhile chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his hat--a fresh beaver hat--when I came close singing out with sassy surprise. There was no hair on his head--none to speak of at least--nothing but a pocket-size scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it nimble than ever I bolted a dinner. Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him. Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at lowest showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of unseasoned palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some awful savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too--perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk! But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his big grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious niggling deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days' older Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at world-class I almost thought that this black manikin was a tangible baby preserved in some exchangeable manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a respectable deal like milled ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this trivial hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very jet, so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate minuscule shrine or chapel for his Congo idol. I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at ease meantime--to see what was side_by_side to follow. First he takes about a dual handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire, and still headlong withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a civilized offer of it to the little negro. But the small devil did not seem to fancy such ironic sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics were accompanied by still strange guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock. All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now exhibiting impregnable symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before the loose was put out, to break the spell in which I had so long been bound. But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a disastrous one. Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instantaneous, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out large clouds of tobacco smoke. The following moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me. Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep muted, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning." Who-e debel you?"--he at final said--" you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e." And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark." Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. "Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!"" Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him." Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here wouldn't harm a hair of your head."" Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that that darned harpooneer was a cannibal?"" I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads around town?--but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"" Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed." You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a polite but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the unharmed a clear, comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in light, and I will turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured." This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to one side as much as to say--" I won't touch a leg of ye."" Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go." I turned in, and never slept better in my life. CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane. Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and fond manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of unmatched lilliputian parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an endless Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade--owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at diverse times--this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that like patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other--I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days premature; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,--my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the foresighted day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my lilliputian room in the tertiary floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a sulfurous sigh got between the sheets. I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and worse--at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet, beseeching her as a especial favour to give me a good slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unbearable length of time. But she was the upright and most painstaking of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For various hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a gravid deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the gravid subsequent misfortunes. At terminal I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it--half steeped in dreams--I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, soundless form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most atrocious fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one individual inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it. Now, take away the painful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only live to the amusing predicament. For though I tried to move his arm--unlock his bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse him--" Queequeg!"--but his sole answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the extensive day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg!--in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and ceaseless expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that married sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, sloshed as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no grave misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so queer a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress initiative and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the solid apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is wonderful how essentially civil they are. I pay this finicky compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of bully rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the good of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding. He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very grandiloquent one, by the by, and then--still minus his trowsers--he hunted up his boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush himself--boots in hand, and hat on--under the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be secret when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage--neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a minor degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and broken down over his eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones--probably not made to order either--rather pinched and tormented him at the foremost go off of a bitter cold morning. Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and observing more and more the untoward figure that Queequeg made, staving about with small else but his hat and boots on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of gruelling soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's upright cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp-worded the long straight edges are always kept. The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the room, wrapped up in his smashing pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton. CHAPTER 5. Breakfast. I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my bedfellow. However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a well joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully comic about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for. The bar-room was now good of the boarders who had been dropping in the night late, and whom I had not as yet had a well look at. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and 2d mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns. You could pretty plainly tell how farseeing each one had been ashore. This young fellow's levelheaded cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Native_American voyage. That man next him looks a few shades short; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropical tawn, but slightly bleached withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with diverse tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone." Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging unresolved a door, and in we went to breakfast. They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-contained in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the large New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the simple crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's performances--this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very good mode of attaining a in_high_spirits social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had anywhere. These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some skillful stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the svelte bashfulness had boarded large whales on the high seas--intact strangers to them--and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table--all of the like calling, all of kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A odd sight; these blate bears, these timid warrior whalemen! But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--at the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding. His nifty admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the impendent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But THAT was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly. We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll. CHAPTER 6. The Street. If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so bizarre an individual as Queequeg circulating among the cultivated society of a polite town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my initiative daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford. In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queer looking nondescripts from strange parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, literal cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare. But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see early sights still more queer, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of greenish Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all hungry for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly untried, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak. No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one--I mean a downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a grand reputation, and joins the slap-up whale-fishery, you should see the comic things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, hapless Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest. But think not that this renowned town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the pricey place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, reliable enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more gilded, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country? Go and gaze upon the iron symbolic harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these gay houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that? In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a splendid wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles. In summer time, the town is perfumed to see; full of fine maples--longsighted avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bighearted horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's concluding day. And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the vernal girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing close the scented Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands. CHAPTER 7. The Chapel. In this like New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not. Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this particular errand. The sky had changed from clear, gay cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with pitch-dark borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:--SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER. SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats' crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES. SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The later CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, AUGUST 3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW. Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the alone person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the alone one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those barren tablets sympathetically caused the previous wounds to bleed afresh. Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the immature grass; who standing among flowers can say--here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those unmovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here. In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the former world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remote Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what ageless, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in dreadful bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a unharmed city. All these things are not without their meanings. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most critical hope. It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, mournful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew zippy again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems--aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling--a speechlessly quick helter-skelter bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thin of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my good being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot. CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit. I had not been seated very farseeing ere a man of a sure venerable robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was the famed Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy honest-to-goodness age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a 2d flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow. No one having previously heard his history, could for the 1st time behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest, because there were sure engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, due to that adventuresome maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his large pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit. Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very high-flown one, and since a regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for an exigent at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still venerating dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel. The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my world-class glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however commodious for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him strong in his small Quebec. I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide-cut reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of forcible isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold--a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a repeated well of water within the walls. But the side ladder was not the lonesome strange feature of the place, borrowed from the chaplain's old sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was adorned with a orotund painting representing a gallant ship beating against a dreaded storm off a lee coast of smutty rocks and snowy breakers. But in_high_spirits above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel's face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the ship's tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. "Ah, imposing ship," the angel seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou baronial ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off--serene azure is at hand." Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed beak. What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the former brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or fouled is maiden invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow. CHAPTER 9. The Sermon. Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. "Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!" There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher. He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his big brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea. This ended, in prolonged grave tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy--"The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a sorry gloom, While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom. "I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell--Oh, I was plunging to despair. "In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints--No more_than the whale did me confine. "With speed he flew to my relief, As on a refulgent dolphin borne; Awful, yet smart, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God. "My song for ever shall record That tremendous, that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power." Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled gamy above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at net, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: "beloved shipmates, clinch the concluding verse of the initiatory chapter of Jonah--'And God had prepared a enceinte fish to swallow up Jonah.'"" Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is one of the little strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a significant lesson to us is this prophet! What a stately thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But WHAT is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as over-the-top men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As iniquitous men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists." With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of knowing men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the Modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and suitable of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a worthless burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fleeting! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At final, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his poor smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still life-threatening way, one whispers to the other--" Jack, he's robbed a widow;" or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad, I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his likeable shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the good of it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin."'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies.'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.'We sail with the future coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him.'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any good man that goes a passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent.'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--I'll pay now.' For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history,'that he paid the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning." Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the common sum; and it's assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fleeting; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rearward with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage.'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now,'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.''Thou lookest like it,' says the Captain,'there's thy room.' Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the minuscule state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is faithful, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the low of his bowels' wards." Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly neat itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fleeting finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more_than and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans,'straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'" Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the popish race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that wretched plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep." And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the maiden of recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his outrageous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far first-come-first-serve of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship--a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear,'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargy by that fearful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, shocked Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high-pitched upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep." Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more_than certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the unhurt matter to in_high_spirits Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this capital tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions.'What is thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of pitiable Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him."'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God THEN! Straightway, he now goes on to make a replete confession; whereupon the mariners became more_than and more_than appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,--when pitiable Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for HIS sake this dandy tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah." And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many whitened bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For wicked as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his horrendous punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamant for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah." While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without seemed to add novel power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swart brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them. There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more_than; and, at final, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself. But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deep yet manful humility, he spake these words:" Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a capital sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads ME that other and more painful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet--'out of the belly of hell'--when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lord came a 2d time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!" This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose safe name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would not be straight, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the large Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!" He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,--" But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and gamey the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck gamy than the kelson is low? Delight is to him--a far, far up, and inward delight--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his ain inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And ageless delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his last breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?" He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place. CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend. Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that fiddling negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his pagan way. But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the table, took up a great book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the pages with calculated regularity; at every fiftieth page--as I fancied--stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin again at the following fifty; seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more than 50, and it was only by such a bombastic number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited. With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his eldritch tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a uncomplicated honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem nonsensical, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same foresighted regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the rattling book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference of his selfsame strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very piffling, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is--which was the alone way he could get there--thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his ain companionship; always adequate to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be truthful philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have "broken his digester." As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in grave swells; I began to be sensitive of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more_than my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the selfsame magnets that thus drew me. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but vacuous courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some favorable signs and hints, doing my good to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night's hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented. We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the just we could about the various outer sights to be seen in this celebrated town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us. If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, this pleasant, cordial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those honest-to-goodness rules would not apply. After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his tremendous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise. I was a right Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be overjealous of an insignificant bit of disastrous wood? impossible! But what is worship?--to do the will of God--THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?--to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me--THAT is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our ain consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some lilliputian chat. How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there undefendable the identical bottom of their souls to each early; and some sometime couples often lie and chat over erstwhile times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving pair. CHAPTER 11. Nightgown. We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and spare and easy were we; when, at final, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future. Yes, we became very waking; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up skinny together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very overnice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some lowly part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over well-heeled, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the worldwide consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the sybaritic discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an polar crystal. We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his ain identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my ain pleasant and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced a unsympathetic revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were good to strike a light, seeing that we were so all-inclusive awake; and besides he felt a potent desire to have a few tranquil puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how pliant our tight prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only awake to the condensed secret comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a tangible friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a naughty hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp. Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far remote scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the solid story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give. CHAPTER 12. Biographical. Queequeg was a aboriginal of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are. When a new-hatched savage running wild about his aboriginal woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a fleeceable sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a unassailable desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a high Chief, a King; his uncle a high Priest; and on the paternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was first-class blood in his veins--royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth. A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a removed strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low-pitched tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle grim in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces. In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at final relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage--this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happy than they were; and more_than than that, still good than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both piteous and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at final in erstwhile Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, misfortunate Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a loathsome world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan. And thus an onetime idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home. By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very old and weak at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he was dreadful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,--as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now. I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his next movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that whaling was my ain design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventuresome whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the like boat, the same mess with me, in forgetful to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of keen usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly unlearned of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen. His story being ended with his pipe's final dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping. CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow. Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using, however, my comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the identical person whom I now companied with. We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much--for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,--but at seeing him and me upon such secret terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find their ain harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his ain harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a deadly combat, and deeply inner with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with their own scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish them--even so, Queequeg, for his ain private reasons, preferred his own harpoon. Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a amusing story about the initiative wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing--though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn't the people laugh?" Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of untried cocoanuts into a turgid stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts, a very stately meticulous gentleman, at least for a sea captain--this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honour, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said,--for those people have their grace as well as we--though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the large Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrate and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed side_by_side the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself--being Captain of a ship--as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King's own house--the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;--taking it I suppose for a Brobdingnagian finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?--Didn't our people laugh?" At last-place, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at final; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most precarious and foresightful voyage ended, only begins a second; and a 2d ended, only begins a 3rd, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort. Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed refreshful; the small Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a immature colt his snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!--how I spurned that turnpike earth!--that common highway all over dented with the marks of subservient heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records. At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So broad of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost heaven-sent dexterity and strength, sent him eminent up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff." Capting! Capting!" yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;" Capting, Capting, here's the devil."" Hallo, _you_ sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you might have killed that chap?"" What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me." He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there," pointing to the still shivering greenhorn." Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e grownup whale!"" Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye." But it so happened just then, that it was eminent time for the Captain to mind his ain eye. The surpassing strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet, and the wondrous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the integral after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the depleted jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the former like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and splendid fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a stately trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water--wise water--something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself--" It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians." CHAPTER 14. Nantucket. Nothing more happened on the passage desirable the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket. Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a bare hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more_than sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their identical chairs and tables minuscule clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois. Look now at the howling traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Amerind in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a parlous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,--the poor small Indian's skeleton. What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more_than experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of enceinte ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mighty animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most cragged! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most unafraid and malicious assaults! And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors ain empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, early fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is his home; THERE lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at net, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales. CHAPTER 15. Chowder. It was quite late in the evening when the lilliputian Moss came snugly to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the serious kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was celebrated for his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow-bellied warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse--our first point of departure--must be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little in the grim, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no mistaking. Two enormous wooden pots painted pitch-dark, and suspended by asses' ears, swung from the cross-trees of an sure-enough top-mast, planted in front of an sure-enough doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this quondam top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, TWO of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's sinister, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of portentous black pots too! Are these lowest throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet? I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt." Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"" Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey." And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a niggling room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said--" Clam or Cod?"" What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness." Clam or Cod?" she repeated." A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?" says I, "but that's a rather stale and clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?" But being in a enceinte hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared." Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for us both on one clam?" However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, angelical friends! hearken to me. It was made of lowly juicy clams, scarcely big than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into lilliputian flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly fantabulous, we despatched it with neat expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word" cod" with nifty emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a dissimilar flavor, and in near time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us. We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look, Queequeg, ain't that a alive eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?" Fishiest of all shady places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a dressed necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior sure-enough shark-skin. There was a shady flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye. Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning the near way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. "Why not?" said I;" every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon--but why not?" "Because it's dangerous," says she. "Ever since unseasoned Stiggs coming from that unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with only three barrels of _ile_, was found dead in my first floor back, with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich grievous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg" (for she had learned his name), "I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?"" Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety." CHAPTER 16. The Ship. In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been diligently consulting Yojo--the name of his black little god--and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg. I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed dandy confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the unharmed, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs. Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the selection of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler skillful fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that trifling piffling affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our minuscule bedroom--for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that day; HOW it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles--leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were three ships up for three-years' voyages--The Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. DEVIL-DAM, I do not know the origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us. You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;--priggish luggers; hilly Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare sure-enough craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather little if anything; with an ex claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a Gallic grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her august bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvelous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more_than than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his ain, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,--this honest-to-god Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any uncivilised Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of milled ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the tenacious sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the farsighted narrow grim jaw of her genetic foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that. Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a cone-shaped shape, some ten feet mellow; consisting of the long, immense slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and eminent part of the jaws of the right-whale. Planted with their wide ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each early, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem's head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a perfect view forward. And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command. He was seated on an passe oaken chair, wriggling all over with rum carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same pliable stuff of which the wigwam was constructed. There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the aged man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in sorry pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there was a fine and almost microscopical net-work of the minute wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual sailings in many laborious gales, and always looking to windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effective in a scowl." Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of the tent." Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?" he demanded." I was thinking of shipping."" Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer--ever been in a stove boat?"" No, Sir, I never have."" Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?" Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I've been several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that--"" Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships. But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?--it looks a little fishy, don't it, eh?--Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?--Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?--Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?" I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was broad of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard." But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping ye."" Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world."" Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?"" Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"" Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."" I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself."" Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to, young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, new man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg."" What do you mean, sir? Was the early one lost by a whale?"" Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the atrocious parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!--ah, ah!" I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know there was any queer ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might have inferred as much from the round-eyed fact of the accident."" Look ye now, immature man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, five_hundred'ye see; thou dost not talk shark a bit. SURE, ye've been to sea before now; sure of that?"" Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the merchant--"" Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant service--don't aggravate me--I won't have it. But let us understand each other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel inclined for it?"" I do, sir."" Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a bouncy whale's throat, and then jump after it? Answer, prompt!"" I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid of, that is; which I don't take to be the fact."" Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there." For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this odd request, not knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand. Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the undefended ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly flat and forbidding; not the slender variety that I could see." Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye see?"" Not much," I replied--" nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."" Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?" I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the Pequod was as safe a ship as any--I thought the full--and all this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness to ship me." And thou mayest as well signed the papers right off," he added--" come along with ye." And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin. Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one of the magnanimous owners of the vessel; the former shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of erstwhile annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in sanctioned state stocks bringing in good interest. Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in cosmopolitan retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these like Quakers are the most sanguineous of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance. So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names--a singularly mutual fashion on the island--and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the bald-faced, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not wretched a Norse sea-king, or a poetic Pagan Roman. And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior lifelike force, with a global brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's dulcet or savage impressions impertinent from her ain virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from inadvertent advantages, to learn a sheer and queasy lofty language--that man makes one in a whole nation's census--a mighty pageant creature, formed for baronial tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or early circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a sure morbidness. Be sure of this, O youthful ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed rum, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances. Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-fixed, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called grievous things, and indeed deemed those self-same good things the veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strict sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many ungarmented, lovely island creatures, round the Horn--all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of unwashed consistency about worthy Captain Peleg. Though refusing, from scrupulous scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the pensive evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the sombre drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income. Now, Bildad, I am bad to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, knockout task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the sure-enough Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely spooky, till you could clutch something--a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or former, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person was the accurate embodiment of his useful character. On his tenacious, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no supererogatory beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat. Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume." Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying those Scriptures, now, for the net thirty years, to my sure knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?" As if tenacious habituated to such profane talk from his older shipmate, Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg." He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship."" Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me." I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so acute a Quaker." What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg." He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book in a mumbling tone quite audible. I thought him the gay erstwhile Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg, his friend and former shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest, and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink before him, and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high-pitched time to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already cognisant that in the whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the several duties of the ship's company. I was also mindful that being a immature hand at whaling, my ain lay would not be very gravid; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay--that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather LONG LAY, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver. It might be thought that this was a piteous way to accumulate a deluxe fortune--and so it was, a very wretched way indeed. But I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite contented if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this sick sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the unscathed, I thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was of a square-shouldered make. But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable honest-to-god crony Bildad; how that they being the main proprietors of the Pequod, therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the unscathed management of the ship's affairs to these two. And I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod, quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his ain fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife, onetime Bildad, to my no humble surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, "LAY not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth--"" Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay shall we give this youthful man?"" Thou knowest sound," was the funereal reply, "the seven hundred and seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust-brown do corrupt, but LAY--'" LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and seventy-seventh! Well, sometime Bildad, you are determined that I, for one, shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though from the magnitude of the figure it might at foremost deceive a landsman, yet the slight consideration will show that though seven hundred and 77 is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a TEENTH of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a dear deal less than seven hundred and lxxvii gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time." Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to swindle this untried man! he must have more_than than that."" Seven hundred and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling--" for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."" I am going to put him down for the three hundredth," said Peleg, "do ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say." Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said," Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship--widows and orphans, many of them--and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this immature man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg."" Thou Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. "Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the large ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn."" Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a tattling one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg."" Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; retiring all rude bearing, ye insult me. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-coloured son of a wooden gun--a straight wake with ye!" As he thundered out this he made a first-come-first-serve at Bildad, but with a tall oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him. Alarmed at this painful outburst between the two chief and responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who, I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the flimsy intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. "Whew!" he whistled at net--" the squall's gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone. That's he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my immature man, Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth lay."" Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to ship too--shall I bring him down to-morrow?"" To be certain," said Peleg. "Fetch him along, and we'll look at him."" What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in which he had again been burying himself." Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg. "Has he ever whaled it any?" turning to me." Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."" Well, bring him along then." And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had done a well morning's work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape. But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till all is quick for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found." And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right enough; thou art shipped."" Yes, but I should like to see him."" But I don't think thou wilt be capable to at present. I don't know exactly what's the matter with him; but he keeps nigh inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't sick; but no, he isn't well either. Any how, youthful man, he won't always see me, so I don't suppose he will thee. He's a queer man, Captain Ahab--so some think--but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the vernacular; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mighty, foreign foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keen and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; HE'S AHAB, boy; and Ahab of previous, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"" And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?"" Come hither to me--hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance in his eye that almost startled me. "Look ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself.'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It's a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is--a good man--not a pious, full man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man--something like me--only there's a upright deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg final voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody--despairing moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's good to sail with a moody good captain than a riant bad one. So good-bye to thee--and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife--not three voyages wedded--a sweetened, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that honest-to-goodness man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!" As I walked away, I was total of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind. CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan. As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the great respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how amusing, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name. I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most ludicrous notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;--but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be contented; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. "Queequeg," said I softly through the key-hole:--all silent. "I say, Queequeg! why don't you speak? It's I--Ishmael." But all remained still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an peculiar corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening former had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake." Queequeg!--Queequeg!"--all still. Something must have happened. Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person I met--the chamber-maid. "La! la!" she cried, "I thought something must be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it's been just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma'am!--Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!"--and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following. Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet in the former, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding her minuscule black boy meantime." Wood-house!" cried I, "which way to it? Run for God's sake, and fetch something to pry unfastened the door--the axe!--the axe! he's had a stroke; depend upon it!"--and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the total castor of her countenance." What's the matter with you, young man?"" Get the axe! For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open!"" Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one hand free; "look here; are you talking about prying undefended any of my doors?"--and with that she seized my arm. "What's the matter with you? What's the matter with you, shipmate?" In as calm, but speedy a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an insistent; then exclaimed--" No! I haven't seen it since I put it there." Running to a little closet under the landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's harpoon was missing. "He's killed himself," she cried. "It's unfort'nate Stiggs done over again there goes another counterpane--God pity his poor mother!--it will be the ruin of my house. Has the pathetic lad a sister? Where's that girl?--there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with--" no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;"--might as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What's that noise there? You, vernal man, avast there!" And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force candid the door." I don't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith, there's one about a mile from here. But avast!" putting her hand in her side-pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess; let's see." And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg's subsidiary bolt remained unwithdrawn within." Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry a little, for a skillful start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself wide against the mark. With a exceeding noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and equanimous; right in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat like a carven image with scarce a sign of active life." Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's the matter with you?"" He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady. But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost unbearable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals." Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's ALIVE at all events; so leave us, if you please, and I will see to this strange affair myself." Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could do--for all my polite arts and blandishments--he would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in the slightest way. I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so; yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he'll get up sooner or recent, no doubt. It can't last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don't believe it's very punctual then. I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the prospicient stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it (that is, a light whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock, I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright pointless and insane to be sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head." For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have some supper. You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg." But not a word did he reply. Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But premature to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the dim doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg--not four feet off--sitting there in that restless position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of it; sleeping all night in the like room with a broad awake pagan on his hams in this dark, unaccountable Ramadan! But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the initiatory glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with steady and grating joints, but with a pollyannaish look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over. Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that former person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frenetic; when it is a positively_charged torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him. And just so I now did with Queequeg. "Queequeg," said I, "get into bed now, and lie and listen to me." I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were blunt nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in former things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans. I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a gravid feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a slap-up battle wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening." No more, Queequeg," said I, shuddering; "that will do;" for I knew the inferences without his farther hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when a large battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed in slap-up wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent round with the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys. After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the 1st place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that significant subject, unless considered from his ain point of view; and, in the 2nd place, he did not more than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he no doubt thought he knew a upright deal more about the true religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and compassion, as though he thought it a swell pity that such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelistic pagan piety. At terminal we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones. CHAPTER 18. His Mark. As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their papers." What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf." I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."" Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. "He must show that he's converted. Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "art thou at present in communion with any Christian church?"" Why," said I, "he's a member of the initiatory Congregational Church." Here be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches." First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying, taking out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his with_child yellow bandana handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg." How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not very long, I rather guess, untested man."" No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it would have washed some of that devil's low-spirited off his face."" Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord's day."" I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."" Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with me--explain thyself, thou untested Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me." Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. "I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of us belong; the keen and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in THAT we all join hands."" Splice, thou mean'st SPLICE hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer. "Young man, you'd better ship for a missional, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a best sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy--why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned something. Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there--what's that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the slap-up anchor, what a harpoon he's got there! looks like unspoiled stuff that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?" Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:--" Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over one-time Bildad's broad brim, clear across the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight." Now," said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, "spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead."" Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway." Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket." So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled among the like ship's company to which I myself belonged. When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't know how to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy mark?" But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part in standardized ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his naming, it stood something like this:--Quohog. his X mark. Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the Brobdingnagian pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose," placed it in Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, "Son of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the horrid dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness benignant! steer clear of the fiery pit!" Something of the salt sea yet lingered in previous Bildad's language, heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases." Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer," cried Peleg. "pious harpooneers never make good voyagers--it takes the shark out of'em; no harpooneer is deserving a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was unseasoned Nat Swaine, once the gay boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones."" Peleg! Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "thou thyself, as I myself, hast seen many a parlous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?"" Hear him, hear him now," cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,--" hear him, all of ye. Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands--how to rig jury-masts--how to get into the dear port; that was what I was thinking of." Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise might have been wasted. CHAPTER 19. The Prophet." Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?" Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the water, for the moment each occupied with his ain thoughts, when the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black-market handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up." Have ye shipped in her?" he repeated." You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose," said I, trying to gain a fiddling more time for an uninterrupted look at him." Aye, the Pequod--that ship there," he said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object." Yes," said I, "we have just signed the articles."" Anything down there about your souls?"" About what?"" Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly. "No matter though, I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--good luck to'em; and they are all the serious off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon."" What are you jabbering about, shipmate?" said I." HE'S got adequate, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps," abruptly said the stranger, placing a uneasy emphasis upon the word HE." Queequeg," said I, "let's go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know."" Stop!" cried the stranger. "Ye said honest--ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder yet, have ye?"" Who's Old Thunder?" said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his manner." Captain Ahab."" What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?"" Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav'n't seen him yet, have ye?"" No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but is getting serious, and will be all right again before long."" All right again before long!" laughed the stranger, with a solemnly gibelike sort of laugh. "Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be all right; not before."" What do you know about him?"" What did they TELL you about him? Say that!"" They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that he's a in_effect whale-hunter, and a effective captain to his crew."" That's true, that's unfeigned--yes, both lawful enough. But you must jump when he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go--that's the word with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like bushed for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?--heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn't ye hear a word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I don't think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, THAT every one knows a'most--I mean they know he's only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off."" My friend," said I, "what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don't know, and I don't much care; for it seems to me that you must be a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of his leg."" ALL about it, eh--sure you do?--all?"" Pretty sure." With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger stood a moment, as if in a tumultuous reverie; then starting a little, turned and said:--" Ye've shipped, have ye? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won't be, after all. Anyhow, it's all fixed and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any former men, God pity'em! Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the unspeakable heavens bless ye; I'm dreary I stopped ye."" Look here, friend," said I, "if you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say."" And it's said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are just the man for him--the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell'em I've concluded not to make one of'em."" Ah, my dear fellow, you can't fool us that way--you can't fool us. It is the easy thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a outstanding secret in him."" Morning to ye, shipmates, morning."" Morning it is," said I. "Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?"" Elijah." Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other's fashion, upon this ragged sometime sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my comrade, unquiet to see whether the stranger would turn the like corner that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his equivocal, half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the day premature; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things. I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug. CHAPTER 20. All Astir. A day or two passed, and there was bully activity aboard the Pequod. Not only were the old sails being mended, but novel sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a close. Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a tart look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging were working till long after night-fall. On the day following Queequeg's signing the articles, word was given at all the inns where the ship's company were stopping, that their chests must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they always give very farsighted notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail for various days. But no wonder; there was a estimable deal to be done, and there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully equipped. Every one knows what a multitude of things--beds, sauce-pans, knives and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are essential to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the all-inclusive ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the slap-up length of the whaling voyage, the legion articles curious to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the selfsame things upon which the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate ship. At the period of our arrival at the Island, the enceinte storage of the Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and ends of things, both declamatory and small. Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad's sister, a lean former lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if SHE could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry; another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where he kept his log; a 3rd time with a roll of flannel for the little of some one's creaky back. Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this large-hearted Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars. But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last day, with a recollective oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles needed, and at every bracing arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam. During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they would answer, that he was getting well and good, and was expected aboard every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been downright honorable with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the loose sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing. At final it was given out that some time next day the ship would certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very other start. CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard. It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew near the wharf." There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right," said I to Queequeg, "it can't be shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess; come on!"" Avast!" cried a voice, whose owner at the like time coming close behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah." Going aboard?"" Hands off, will you," said I." Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "go'way!"" Ain't going aboard, then?"" Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?"" No, no, no; I wasn't cognisant of that," said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unexplainable glances." Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained."" Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?"" He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."" Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces." Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on." But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said--" Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that ship a while ago?" Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, "Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too bleak to be sure."" Very dim, very black," said Elijah. "Morning to ye." Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder again, said, "See if you can find'em now, will ye?" Find who?"" Morning to ye! morning to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off. "Oh! I was going to warn ye against--but never mind, never mind--it's all one, all in the family too;--keen frost this morning, ain't it? Good-bye to ye. Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand Jury." And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no little wonderment at his mad impudence. At terminal, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at unscathed length upon two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profound slumber slept upon him." Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?" said I, looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it not for Elijah's otherwise incomprehensible question. But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had salutary sit up with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was cushy enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there." Gracious! Queequeg, don't sit there," said I." Oh! perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't hurt him face."" Face!" said I, "call that his face? very freehearted countenance then; but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you are lowering, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't wake." Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and smashing people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the low-pitched orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion; much unspoilt than those garden-chairs which are exchangeable into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps in some damp marshy place. While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper's head." What's that for, Queequeg?"" Perry loose, kill-e; oh! perry easy!" He was going on with some risky reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe, which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The secure vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes." Holloa!" he breathed at last-place, "who be ye smokers?"" Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"" Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain came aboard last-place night."" What Captain?--Ahab?"" Who but him indeed?" I was going to ask him some farther questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a noise on deck." Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief mate, that; well man, and a pious; but all alert now, I must turn to." And so saying he went on deck, and we followed. It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and respective of the shore people were engaged in bringing assorted concluding things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin. CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas. At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her terminal gift--a night-cap for Stubb, the 2d mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward--after all this, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:" Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is all ready--just spoke to him--nothing more_than to be got from shore, eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster'em aft here--blast'em!"" No need of profane words, however heavy the hurry, Peleg," said Bildad," but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding." How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot's; and as he was not yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed raw enough; especially as in the merchant service many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot. But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad." Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast. "Mr. Starbuck, drive'em aft."" Strike the tent there!"--was the next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor." Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!--jump!"--was the next command, and the crew sprang for the handspikes. Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots of the port--he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft--Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a grim stave of psalmody, to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days premature, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman's berth. Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and swore astern in the most tremendous manner. I almost thought he would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the like, thinking of the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden abrupt poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first kick." Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared." Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don't ye spring, I say, all of ye--spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!" And so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while unflappable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day. At net the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a brusk, dusty Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost wide upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in urbane armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the whitened ivory tusks of some vast elephant, huge curving icicles depended from the bows. Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the former craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard,--" Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green. So to the Jews quondam Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between." Never did those gratifying words sound more_than sweetly to me than then. They were good of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally young, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrod, unwilted, remains at midsummer. At final we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging alongside. It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so tenacious and precarious a voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an honest-to-goodness shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,--miserable old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the wide-cut and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say," Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can." As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck--now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate. But, at concluding, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him,--" Captain Bildad--come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful, careful!--come, Bildad, boy--say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck--luck to ye, Mr. Stubb--luck to ye, Mr. Flask--good-bye and good luck to ye all--and this day three years I'll have a hot supper smoking for ye in honest-to-god Nantucket. Hurrah and away!"" God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men," murmured old Bildad, almost incoherently. "I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye--a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye'll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don't stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; honest white cedar plank is raised replete three per cent. within the year. Don't forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the dark-green locker! Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days, men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's ripe gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don't keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be thrifty with the butter--twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye, if--"" Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,--away!" and with that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat. Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic. CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore. Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a marvellous, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with likable awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' grave voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another raging term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the tempest-tost ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is misfortunate; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights'gainst the selfsame winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her acid foe! Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the fearless effort of the soul to keep the subject independence of her sea; while the fantastic winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the perfidious, submissive shore? But as in landlessness alone resides mellow truth, shoreless, indefinite as God--so, good is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the frightful! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing--square up, leaps thy apotheosis! CHAPTER 24. The Advocate. As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the world-class place, it may be deemed almost senseless to establish the fact, that among people at big, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any many-sided metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at good, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bally badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honour. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the solid, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among the cleanly things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are like to the ineffable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the democratic conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God! But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the unplumbed homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory! But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been. Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $ 20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $ 7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling? But this is not the half; look again. I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one individual peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the unhurt broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the gamey and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so noteworthy in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their serial issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remote and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honour and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first taken between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anon. Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as outstanding, and great than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathen sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the erstwhile South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of our grand Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted vile of being set down in the ship's common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but compound, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the prospicient line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts. That smashing America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its inaugural blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously fell; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the genuine mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the 1st Australian settlement, the emigrants were various times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial-grade homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their beginning destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold. But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no aesthetically baronial associations connected with it, then am I ready to shiver l lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet every time. The whale has no noted author, and whaling no far-famed chronicler, you will say. THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke! True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no in_force blood in their veins. NO GOOD BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS? They have something better than majestic blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the honest-to-goodness settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a foresighted line of Folgers and harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--this day darting the burred iron from one side of the world to the other. Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable. WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By former English statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish." * Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way. THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the mighty triumphs given to a papistical general upon his entering the world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most blazing object in the cymballed procession.* *See subsequent chapters for something more_than on this head. Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in whaling. NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and 50 whales. I account that man more_than honourable than that gravid captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns. And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high quiet world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more_than properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. CHAPTER 25. Postscript. In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not inordinate surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be censurable? It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even mod ones, a sure rummy process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its national run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the crucial dignity of this purple process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality. But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the mellisonant of all oils? Think of that, ye firm Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff! CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires. The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a aboriginal of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure blistering latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of universal drought and famine, or upon one of those immobile days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or fervid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, unwavering man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well near to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories of his untried Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more parlous vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most honest and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more severe comrade than a coward." Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as thrifty a man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery." But we shall ere foresightful see what that word "measured" precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter. Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply utile to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the neat staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father's? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother? With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a sure superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it was not in fairish nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some hardy men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more marvellous, because more apparitional terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an maddened and mighty man. But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the pure abasement of pitiable Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem repugnant as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have beggarly and meager faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any inglorious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costly robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with slap-up anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality! If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe eminent qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most doleful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman's arm with some supernal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his black set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou bully popular God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of fine gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him high than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God! CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires. Stubb was the 2d mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valorous; taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while occupied in the most impendent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year. Good-humored, well-fixed, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the well-off arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his honest-to-goodness rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most cheesed_off monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfy dinner, no doubt, like a in_force sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner. What, perhaps, with former things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black fiddling pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a hale row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within soft reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth. I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or adrift, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all deadly tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent. The tertiary mate was Flask, a aboriginal of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy untested fellow, very rough concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the nifty leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystical ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of any potential danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the rattling whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could be well likened to the short, hearty timber known by that name in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those battering seas. Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with their recollective keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins. And since in this noted fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of one-time, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in sure conjunctures provides him with a sassy lance, when the old one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a nigh intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of them belonged. First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known. Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Amerind from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the net remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his mellow cheek bones, and black rounding eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression--all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the bully New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the primal forests of the main. But no long snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the bang-up whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the 2d mate's squire. Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a mammoth, coal-black negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two prosperous hoops, so large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his aboriginal coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his uncivilised virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a lily-white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of small Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No lowly number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rough shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the near whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, ISOLATOES too, I call such, not acknowledging the vulgar continent of men, but each ISOLATO living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip--he never did--oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the drear Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere longsighted see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the dandy quarter-deck on high-pitched, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there! CHAPTER 28. Ahab. For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each early at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the alone commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin. Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my initiatory vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's satanic incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that bizarre prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness--to call it so--which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more savage, heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this--and rightly ascribed it--to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three sound, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his ain different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its unbearable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a bonnie wind the ship was rushing through the water with a spiteful sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck. There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted of_age robustness. His whole in_high_spirits, encompassing form, seemed made of unanimous bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, rarefied trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some do-or-die wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's aged, an former Gay-Head Amerind among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years older did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any deadly fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an previous ghastly man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon uncivilised Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this sometime Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no livid sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered--then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole. So powerfully did the unscathed grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the wild white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Amerind once; "but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of'em." I was smitten with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty confining to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a tumultuous master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he was every day seeable to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little affable, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the deadened wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unneeded there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there was niggling or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the high-flown peaks to pile themselves upon. Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropical woods; even the spare, rugged, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few unripened sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that schoolgirlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile. CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb. Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the smart Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the ageless August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, open, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, pleonastic days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jeweled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man,'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend fresh spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these elusive agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture. Old age is always argus-eyed; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more_than to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. "It feels like going down into one's tomb,"--he would mutter to himself--" for an previous captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth." So, almost every xxiv hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of distressful their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the honest-to-god man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the quondam 2nd mate, came up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then." Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst wad me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.--Down, dog, and kennel!" Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly contemptuous previous man, Stubb was dumb a moment; then said excitedly, "I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir."" Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation." No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be called a dog, sir."" Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!" As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated." I was never served so before without giving a voiceless blow for it," muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. "It's very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go back and strike him, or--what's that?--down here on my knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time I ever DID pray. It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the gay former man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!--his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as indisputable as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the xxiv; and he don't sleep then. Didn't that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of horrifying hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot sure-enough man! I guess he's got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say--worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in the hold? Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old game--Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of'em. But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes again. But how's that? didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of THAT! He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he DID kick me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a washy bone. What the devil's the matter with me? I don't stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that Old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though--How? how? how?--but the sole way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight." CHAPTER 30. The Pipe. When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In sure-enough Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a corking lord of Leviathans was Ahab. Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How now," he soliloquized at final, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! arduous must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring--aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such skittish whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my concluding jets were the stiff and full of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapours among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more--" He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the like instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks. CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab. Next morning Stubb accosted Flask." Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man's ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my petty man, I kicked my leg right off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But what was still more_than singular, Flask--you know how curious all dreams are--through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that kick from Ahab.'Why,' thinks I,'what's the row? It's not a real leg, only a false leg.' And there's a mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the hand, Flask, l times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living member--that makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed pyramid--so confoundedly conflicting was it all, all the while, I say, I was thinking to myself,'what's his leg now, but a cane--a whalebone cane. Yes,' thinks I,'it was only a playful cudgelling--in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me--not a base kick. Besides,' thinks I,'look at it once; why, the end of it--the foot part--what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a wide footed farmer kicked me, THERE'S a mephistophelian broad insult. But this insult is whittled down to a point only.' But now comes the smashing joke of the dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired erstwhile merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round.'What are you'bout?' says he. Slid! man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over the fright.'What am I about?' says I at last.'And what business is that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do YOU want a kick?' By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout--what do you think, I saw?--why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck replete of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on 2nd thoughts,'I guess I won't kick you, Old fellow.''Wise Stubb,' said he,'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his ain gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn't going to stop saying over his'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out,'Stop that kicking!''Halloa,' says I,'what's the matter now, onetime fellow?''Look ye here,' says he;'let's argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?''Yes, he did,' says I--'right HERE it was.''Very good,' says he--'he victimised his ivory leg, didn't he?''Yes, he did,' says I.'Well then,' says he,'wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick with correct skilful will? it wasn't a usual pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honour; I consider it an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In honest-to-goodness England the gravid lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by older Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by him; account his kicks honours; and on no account kick back; for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you see that pyramid?' With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?"" I don't know; it seems a sort of anserine to me, tho.'"" May be; may be. But it's made a wise man of me, Flask. D'ye see Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the beneficial thing you can do, Flask, is to let the quondam man alone; never speak to him, whatever he says. Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"" Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!" If ye see a snowy one, split your lungs for him!" What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small drop of something queer about that, eh? A white-hot whale--did ye mark that, man? Look ye--there's something particular in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask. Ahab has that that's flaming on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way." CHAPTER 32. Cetology. Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more particular leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow. It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his full genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the well and previous authorities have laid down." No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820." It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families... . Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal" (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839." Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters."" Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea." "A field strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists." Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of literal knowledge there be short, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some minuscule degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men, small and neat, Old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at declamatory or in petty, written of the whale. Run over a few:--The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show. Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the near existing authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the expectant sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost ugly mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the enceinte of the whales. Yet, owing to the tenacious priority of his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the then mythologic or utterly nameless sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the bully poets of preceding days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at terminal come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! in_force people all,--the Greenland whale is deposed,--the heavy sperm whale now reigneth! There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both precise and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily modest; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not staring in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life. Now the diverse species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an well-heeled outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my ain poor endeavors. I promise nothing consummate; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomic description of the several species, or--in this place at least--to much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder. But it is a ponderous task; no average letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the abominable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a cowardly thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The tremendous tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he the (leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in heartfelt; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle. First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the identical vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby freestanding the whales from the fish." But of my ain knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan. The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their moveable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex lege naturae jure meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug. Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the full sure-enough fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the future point is, in what intragroup respect does the whale differ from early fish. Above, Linnaeus has given you those items. But in abbreviated, they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded. Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be brusque, then, a whale is A SPOUTING FISH WITH A HORIZONTAL TAIL. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the terminal term of the definition is still more weighty, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a upright, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position. By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the whale by the respectable informed Nantucketers; nor, on the early hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence, all the small, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand divisions of the full whale host. *I am mindful that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology. First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large. I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO, the GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE. FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:--I. The SPERM WHALE; II. the RIGHT WHALE; III. the FIN-BACK WHALE; IV. the HUMP-BACKED WHALE; V. the RAZOR-BACK WHALE; VI. the SULPHUR-BOTTOM WHALE. BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER I. (SPERM WHALE).--This whale, among the English of onetime vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the Gallic, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the tenacious Words. He is, without doubt, the large inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the world-class syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at net have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti was really derived. BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER II. (RIGHT WHALE).--In one respect this is the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as "whale oil," an inferior article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in the 2nd species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more_than than two centuries preceding has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor' West Coast, and assorted former parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds. Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a undivided determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to elucidating the sperm whale. BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER III. (FIN-BACK).--Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the versatile names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale whose upstage jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds of prominent wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name, is often a blatant object. This fin is some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angulate shape, and with a very astute pointed end. Even if not the slight former part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with global ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and crinkly hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most glowering waters; his straight and individual lofty jet rising like a magniloquent cynical spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such terrific power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and insuperable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated WHALEBONE WHALES, that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen's names for a few sorts. In connection with this appellative of "Whalebone whales," it is of groovy importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a steady system of Cetology than any other unaffectionate bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other and more all-important particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the gibbous whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this like humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts above mentioned. In versatile sorts of whales, they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an temporary isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has split. But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in his anatomy--there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale's anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is unsufferable correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the diverse leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as usable to the systematizer as those extraneous ones already enumerated. What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their full liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the solitary one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed. BOOK I. (FOLIO) CHAPTER IV. (HUMP-BACK).--This whale is often seen on the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the pop name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump though a humble one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and blithesome of all the whales, making more_than gay foam and white water generally than any other of them. BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER V. (RAZOR-BACK).--Of this whale little is known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know small more of him, nor does anybody else. BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER VI. (SULPHUR-BOTTOM).--Another retiring gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then always at too bang-up a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more_than that is true of ye, nor can the one-time Nantucketer. Thus ends BOOK I. (FOLIO), and now begins BOOK II. (OCTAVO). OCTAVOES.*--These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which present may be numbered:--I., the GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH; III., the NARWHALE; IV., the THRASHER; V., the KILLER. *Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the whales of this order, though low than those of the other order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does. BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER I. (GRAMPUS).--Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to xxv feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in quantity, and pretty honorable for light. By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory of the advance of the not_bad sperm whale. BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER II. (BLACK FISH).--I give the popular fishermen's names for all these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name happens to be undefined or inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, supposed, because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale averages some 16 or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost all latitudes. He has a funny way of showing his dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more_than profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domesticated employment--as some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of sweet wax. Though their blubber is very flimsy, some of these whales will yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil. BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER III. (NARWHALE), that is, NOSTRIL WHALE.--Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a unwell nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found on the threatening side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner something correspondent to the aspect of a clumsy bumbling man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a peculiar example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From sure cloistered older authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the dandy antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the manly deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bluff ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter, "on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious tenacious horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor." An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature. The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is small of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas. BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER IV. (KILLER).--Of this whale little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage--a sort of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the peachy Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included. BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER V. (THRASHER).--This gentleman is illustrious for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage by flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless seas. Thus ends BOOK II. (OCTAVO), and begins BOOK III. (DUODECIMO). DUODECIMOES.--These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise. To those who have not chanced specially to study the capable, it may possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five feet should be marshalled among WHALES--a word, which, in the democratic sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition of what a whale is--i.e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail. BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 1. (HUZZA PORPOISE).--This is the common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always swims in screaming shoals, which upon the tolerant sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a prosperous omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-nourished, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of well oil. But the fine and delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is right eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very readily discernible. But the succeeding time you have a chance, watch him; and you will then see the slap-up Sperm whale himself in miniature. BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER II. (ALGERINE PORPOISE).--A pirate. Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat magnanimous than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but never yet saw him captured. BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER III. (mealymouthed PORPOISE).--The large kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is known. The solitary English name, by which he has hitherto been designated, is that of the fishers--Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and maudlin Amerind eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull, called the "bright waist," that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two separate colours, black above and blanched below. The white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most meanspirited and mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise. Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the small of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, momentaneous, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:--The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and older English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether disused; and can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, total of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing. Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the not_bad Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For humble erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, truthful ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder. Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as well a place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet. The enceinte importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally in the erstwhile Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the navigation and world-wide management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain's more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an significant officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship's deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal. Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this--the initiatory lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain's cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it. Though the longsighted period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the long of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their unwashed luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the meticulous externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the ratty of pilot-cloth. And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the sole homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or IN TERROREM, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea. Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more individual ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's rational superiority what it will, it can never assume the virtual, available supremacy over former men, without the aid of some sort of outside arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less trifling and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and leaves the gamey honours that this air can give, to those men who become renowned more through their multitudinous inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such with_child virtue lurks in these minor things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an majestic brain; then, the vulgar herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so authoritative in his art, as the one now alluded to. But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a wretched quondam whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table. It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From his over inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, "Dinner, Mr. Starbuck," disappears into the cabin. When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck, the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness," Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle. The 2nd Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the primary brace, to see whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise takes up the former burden, and with a rapid "Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows after his predecessors. But the tertiary Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to feel eased from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk's head; and then, by a dextrous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so far at least as he remains seeable from the deck, reversing all former processions, by bringing up the rearward with music. But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and, then, autonomous, hilarious piffling Flask enters King Ahab's presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave. It is not the least among the strange things bred by the vivid artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the candid air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to their accustomed dinner in that same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and lowly air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table; this is wondrous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly royal and intelligent spirit presides over his ain individual dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power and dominion of private influence for the time; that man's royalty of state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned. Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the clean coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his ain proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were as short children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the pocket-size social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the one-time man's knife, as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they would have profaned that moment with the thin observation, even upon so inert a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow earnest meals, eaten in awe-inspiring silence; and yet at table quondam Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And short small Flask, he was the young son, and little boy of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the initiatory degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his absolved, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so farsighted a voyage in such marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man! Another thing. Flask was the final person down at the dinner, and Flask is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask's dinner was badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a modest appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of outmoded beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity of glory: there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any simple sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before direful Ahab. Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in the Pequod's cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pale steward. And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees. They made a sort of irregular servants' hall of the eminent and mighty cabin. In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire care-free license and ease, the almost frenzied democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices. Such pontifical appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a heavy baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the strong ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a agile hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy's memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a keen empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very flighty, shuddering sort of small fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the mordant terrific Ahab, and the periodic riotous visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy's unhurt life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was over. It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing his filed teeth to the Indian's: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the humbled carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the miserable cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship. But for all this, the heavy negro was wonderfully light, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly potential that by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so panoptic, noble, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating--an atrocious sound enough--so much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their lances and early weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been shamed of some murderous, good-time indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! punishing fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his smashing delight, the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their soldierlike bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards. But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their ain peculiar quarters. In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the future; and, as a permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the concluding of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that hazardous Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his ain paws; so, in his inclement, howling previous age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom! CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head. It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my initiative mast-head came round. In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more_than, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage she is drawing near home with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial even--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the final; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more. Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take it, that the early standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the lofty mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that large stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the world-wide belief among archaeologists, that the foremost pyramids were founded for galactic purposes: a theory singularly supported by the curious stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with colossal long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for Modern stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famed Christian hermit of honest-to-goodness times, who built him a high-flown stone pillar in the desert and spent the unanimous latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the net, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well open of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely unequal_to to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high-pitched aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned. It may seem insupportable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the exclusive historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The desirable Obed tells us, that in the other times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected idealistic spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats near the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were mammoth stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the vast monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the noted Colossus at former Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unneeded excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; belly-up securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner--for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. In one of those southerly whalesmen, on a tenacious three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of the diverse hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several intact months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly needy of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those lowly and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallant-mast, where you stand upon two slight parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t' gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the compact watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its heavy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running enceinte risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or extra skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat. Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called CROW'S-NESTS, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;" in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented CROW'S-NEST of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's upright craft. He called it the SLEET'S CROW'S-NEST, in honour of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ludicrous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our ain children after our ain names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any former apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with a transferrable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a strong gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side succeeding the stern of the ship, is a well-fixed seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or drifting sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very dissimilar thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the small elaborate conveniences of his crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow's-nest, with a small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called the "local attraction" of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship's planks, and in the Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so many tatterdemalion blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned "binnacle deviations," "azimuth compass observations," and "approximate errors," he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished small case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within prosperous reach of his hand. Though, upon the unharmed, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the dependable, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest within three or four perches of the pole. But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination. Let me make a clean-living breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but no-account guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I--being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude--how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye undecided, and sing out every time." And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to untimely meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this hollow-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romanticist, melancholy, and absent-minded untried men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:--" Roll on, thou deep and dark drab ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain." Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded vernal philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient" interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all ethical ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those vernal Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the optic nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home." Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the occult ocean at his feet for the seeable image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those tough thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck. (ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL) It was not a corking while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden. Soon his unshakable, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like geologic stones, with the curious mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still strange foot-prints--the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought. But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement." D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him pecks the shell.'Twill soon be out." The hours wore on;--Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect. It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft." Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on ship-board except in some extraordinary case." Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come down!" When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with peculiar and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his weighty turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a prosaic feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:--" What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"" Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices." Good!" cried Ahab, with a uncivilized approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them." And what do ye next, men?"" Lower away, and after him!"" And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"" A drained whale or a stove boat!" More and more_than strangely and fiercely beaming and approving, grew the countenance of the sometime man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each early, as if marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly senseless questions. But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching in_high_spirits up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:--" All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?"--holding up a broad bright coin to the sun--" it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D'ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul." While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and unarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him. Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: "Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a round-backed jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same whitened whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"" Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast." It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul:" a ashen whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for blanched water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out." All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more acute interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific recollection." Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that clean whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick."" Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white-hot whale then, Tash?"" Does he fan-tail a little peculiar, sir, before he goes down?" said the Gay-Header deliberately." And has he a funny spout, too," said Daggoo, "very shaggy-coated, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"" And he have one, two, three--oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him--him--" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle--" like him--him--"" Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a large one, like a whole shock of wheat, and lily-white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen--Moby Dick--Moby Dick!"" Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at lowest seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. "Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick--but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?"" Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with a marvellous, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose;" Aye, aye! it was that accursed blank whale that razeed me; made a misfortunate pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that livid whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."" Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited older man: "A keen eye for the white whale; a shrill lance for Moby Dick!"" God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout. "God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the nifty measure of grog. But what's this foresighted face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?"" I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."" Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closelipped, Starbuck; thou requirest a little abject layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a peachy premium HERE!"" He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it rings most Brobdingnagian, but hollow."" Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blind instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."" Hark ye yet again--the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the lily-white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him hideous strength, with an cryptic malice sinewing it. That mysterious thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the blank whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a cloddish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and pale; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are minor indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn--living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards--the unrecking and unworshipping things, that hot; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the ecumenical hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it.'T is but to help strike a fin; no grand feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the honorable lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!--Aye, aye! thy silence, then, THAT voices thee. (ASIDE) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."" God keep me!--keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly. But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the grim laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's depressed eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with footling external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on." The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab. Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship's company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an crying searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those gaga eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian." Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the wakeless charged flagon to the approximate seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts--prospicient swallows, men;'t is hot as Satan's hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me--here's a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!" Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that--Ha! boy, come back? uncollectible pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, were't not thou St. Vitus' imp--away, thou ague!" Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch the axis." So saying, with prolonged arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some unnamed, internal volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his inviolable, sustained, and mystical aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright." In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe,'t is well. For did ye three but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, THAT had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there--yon three most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the bang-up Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your ain condescension, THAT shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!" Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the set-apart iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him." Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!" Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter." Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the homicidal chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this insoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. Once more_than, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his loose hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin. CHAPTER 37. Sunset. THE CABIN; BY THE STERN WINDOWS; AHAB SITTING ALONE, AND GAZING OUT. I leave a lily-white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass. Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun--ho-hum dived from noon--goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too cloggy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds.'T is iron--that I know--not gold.'T is split, too--that I feel; the scraggy edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight! Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low-down, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night--good night! (WAVING HIS HAND, HE MOVES FROM THE WINDOW.)'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad--Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and--Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That's more_than than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies--Take some one of your ain size; don't pommel ME! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but YE have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no retentive gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way! CHAPTER 38. Dusk. BY THE MAINMAST; STARBUCK LEANING AGAINST IT. My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the untellable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible erstwhile man! Who's over him, he cries;--aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my wretched office,--to obey, rebelling; and bad yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the modest gold-fish has its glazed globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock's run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no cardinal to lift again. [ A BURST OF REVELRY FROM THE FORECASTLE. ] Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have little touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the damn orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag black Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and farther on, hunted by its ravenous gurglings. The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life!'t is in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,--as baseless, untutored things are forced to feed--Oh, life!'t is now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but't is not me! that horror's out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences! CHAPTER 39. First Night Watch. Fore-Top. (STUBB SOLUS, AND MENDING A BRACE.) Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!--I've been thinking over it ever since, and that ha, ha's the terminal consequence. Why so? Because a laugh's the heady, light answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left--that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I the early evening felt. Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift, might readily have prophesied it--for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, WISE Stubb--that's my title--well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What's my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes out?--Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's pennant, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh--We'll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim, And break on the lips while meeting. A brave stave that--who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir--(ASIDE) he's my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken.--Aye, aye, sir, just through with this job--coming. CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle. HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS. (FORESAIL RISES AND DISCOVERS THE WATCH STANDING, LOUNGING, LEANING, AND LYING IN VARIOUS ATTITUDES, ALL SINGING IN CHORUS.) Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain! Our captain's commanded.--1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don't be schmalzy; it's bad for the digestion! Take a fresh, follow me! (SINGS, AND ALL FOLLOW) Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A viewing of those dashing whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And we'll have one of those fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail! While the bold harpooner is striking the whale! MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward! 2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I've the sort of mouth for that--the hogshead mouth. So, so, (THRUSTS HIS HEAD DOWN THE SCUTTLE ,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below! Tumble up! DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark this in our previous Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as filliping to others. We sing; they sleep--aye, lie down there, like ground-tier butts. At'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail'em through it. Tell'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell'em it's the resurrection; they must kiss their lowest, and come to judgment. That's the way--THAT'S it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter. FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine! PIP. (SULKY AND SLEEPY) Don't know where it is. FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry's the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't you dance? Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs! legs! ICELAND SAILOR. I don't like your floor, maty; it's too resilient to my taste. I'm used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to throw cold-blooded water on the subject; but excuse me. MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where's your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how five_hundred'ye do? Partners! I must have partners! SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a immature!--then I'll hop with ye; yea, turn grasshopper! LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us. Hoe corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the music; now for it! AZORE SAILOR. (ASCENDING, AND PITCHING THE TAMBOURINE UP THE SCUTTLE.) Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, boys! (THE HALF OF THEM DANCE TO THE TAMBOURINE; SOME GO BELOW; SOME SLEEP OR LIE AMONG THE COILS OF RIGGING. OATHS A-PLENTY.) AZORE SAILOR. (DANCING) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers! PIP. Jinglers, you say?--there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so. CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself. FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split jibs! tear yourselves! TASHTEGO. (QUIETLY SMOKING) That's a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat. OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I will--that's the bitter threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the unripe navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the hale world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so't is right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're immature; I was once. 3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!--whew! this is big than pulling after whales in a calm--give us a whiff, Tash. (THEY CEASE DANCING, AND GATHER IN CLUSTERS. MEANTIME THE SKY DARKENS--THE WIND RISES.) LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva! MALTESE SAILOR. (RECLINING AND SHAKING HIS CAP.) It's the waves--the snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now would all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them evermore! There's naught so mellisonant on earth--heaven may not match it!--as those swift glances of warm, crazy bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes. SICILIAN SAILOR. (RECLINING.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad--fleet interlacings of the limbs--lithe swayings--coyings--flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (NUDGING.) TAHITAN SAILOR. (RECLINING ON A MAT.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!--the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! crushed veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! unripe the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me!--not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the villages?--The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (LEAPS TO HIS FEET.) PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing'gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they'll go lunging presently. DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes! quaternary NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol--fire your ship right into it! ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that one-time man's a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his whale! ALL. Aye! aye! OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the severe sort of tree to live when shifted to any early soil, and here there's none but the crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when fearless hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the sky--lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black. DAGGOO. What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm quarried out of it! SPANISH SAILOR. (ASIDE.) He wants to bully, ah!--the previous grudge makes me touchy (ADVANCING.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind--roguish dark at that. No offence. DAGGOO (GRIMLY). None. ST. JAGO'S SAILOR. That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that can't be, or else in his one case our onetime Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat long in working. 5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What's that I saw--lightning? Yes. SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth. DAGGOO (SPRINGING). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver! SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM). Knife thee heartily! openhanded frame, pocket-size spirit! ALL. A row! a row! a row! TASHTEGO (WITH A WHIFF). A row a'low, and a row aloft--Gods and men--both brawlers! Humph! BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in with ye! ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's knife! A ring, a ring! OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad'st thou the ring? MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails! ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (THEY SCATTER.) PIP (SHRINKING UNDER THE WINDLASS). Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck low, Pip, here comes the majestic yard! It's forged than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don't. Fine prospects to'em; they're on the road to heaven. Hold on heavy! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet--they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? blanched whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale--shirr! shirr!--but spoken of once! and only this evening--it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine--that anaconda of an sure-enough man swore'em in to hunt him! Oh, thou openhanded white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this modest black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear! CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick. I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and strong I shouted, and more_than did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, secret, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge. For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along lonesome latitudes, so as seldom or never for a solid twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, lineal and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the hale world whaling-fleet of the particular individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing not_bad mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no early than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of smashing ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the case-by-case cause. In that way, mostly, the fateful encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded. And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults--not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations--but calamitous to the final degree of fatality; those repeated fateful repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come. Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the reliable histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do mythic rumors naturally grow out of the selfsame body of all surprising terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, raging rumors abound, wherever there is any equal reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every early sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its neat marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any well-defined hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth. No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the bare transit over the all-embracing watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with newfangled terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw. But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and brave enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose solitary knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a infantile fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the bang-up Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him. And as if the now tested reality of his might had in onetime legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists--Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly fierce as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so belated a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are" struck with the most lively terrors," and "often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause instant death." And however the cosmopolitan experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters. So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the early days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes toilsome to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although early leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a flying eternity. On this head, there are some noteworthy documents that may be consulted. Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered. One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was omnipresent; that he had actually been encountered in diametrical latitudes at one and the same instant of time. Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in cracking part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystical modes whereby, after sounding to a big depth, he transports himself with such huge swiftness to the most widely remote points. It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the genuine living experience of living men, the prodigies related in erstwhile times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen. Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, fearless assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his untainted jet would once more be seen. But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and undisputable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a singular snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidic snowy hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him. The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his brilliant aspect, when seen gliding at eminent noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with gold gleamings. Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his noteworthy hue, nor yet his deformed low jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship. Already respective fatalities had attended his chase. But though interchangeable disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's demonic aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent. Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more heroic hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale's horrific wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped crushed jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more_than seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost calamitous encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his unrestrained morbidness he at terminal came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his cerebral and religious exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred livid whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically undefended in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the ecumenical rage and hate felt by his hale race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the exact time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporate animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that grim, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the last monomania seized him, seems all but sure from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving moonstruck; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the Old man's delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the dread madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still elusive form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that stately Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's blanket madness had been left behind; so in that panoptic madness, not one jot of his slap-up rude intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a tempestuous trope may stand, his peculiar lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its ain mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one sane object. This is much; yet Ahab's large, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from within the identical heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand--however grand and marvellous, now quit it;--and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those immense Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastical towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the large gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, pitiful king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the older State-secret come. Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are reasonable, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only dependent to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the fearful casualty which had overtaken him. The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the identical day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the sound qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so wide of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his sometime acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a demonic man! They were bended on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was captive on an venturesome, immitigable, and supernatural revenge. Here, then, was this white-haired, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of simple unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some satanic fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the Old man's ire--by what malevolent magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their unacceptable foe as his; how all this came to be--what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,--all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a 74 can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadly ill. CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather faint, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystic and well nigh indefinable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught. Though in many innate objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its ain, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephants" above all their early magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the advanced kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the regal received; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the majuscule Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the regal colour the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made substantial of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a jubilant day; and though in other deadly sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, stately things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the snowy belt of wampum was the cryptic pledge of honour; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the gamy mysteries of the most lordly religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holy on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the baronial Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holy festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the sodding envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white-hot, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, clean robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in snowy before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white-hot like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and ethical, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more_than of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object awful in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthermost bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the bloodless shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more disgusting than rattling, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.* *With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deep into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the unendurable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of heavenly innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such diametrical emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror. As for the ashen shark, the white-hot gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the like quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the Gallic in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the numb begins with "Requiem eternam" (interminable rest), whence REQUIEM denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him REQUIN. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of religious wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's majuscule, unflattering laureate, Nature.* *I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a drawn-out gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the principal hatches, I saw a imperial, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide-eyed, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the abject warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at final I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this magnificent thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystic impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the stately merit of the poem and the poet. I assert, then, that in the wonderful bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl. But how had the occult thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a learned, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim! Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of immense herds of raging horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelic apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the sometime trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked imperial as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the brave Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on fabled record of this noble horse, that it was his phantasmal whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror. But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross. What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men--has no meaty deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely horrific than the ugly abortion. Why should this be so? Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so virile an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place! Nor, in some things, does the vulgar, inherited experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one seeable quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog--Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever high-minded or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul. But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is deathly man to account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness--though for the time either wholly or in bang-up part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught horrendous, but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified;--can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek? Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to recall them now. Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such foresighted, drab, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul? Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its neighbors--the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods, comes that mammoth ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is total of a soft, dewy, remote dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of foresighted lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the loud and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly insubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the previous fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the magniloquent pale man" of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves--why is this phantom more frightful than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg? Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of desiccated skies that never rain; nor the sight of her broad field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;--it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strange, sorry city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the snowy veil; and there is a gamy horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of consummate decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions. I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the select agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the uninventive mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the next examples. First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely alike circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of whitish whiteness--as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrifying to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till dingy water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?" Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eonian frosted desolateness reigning at such huge altitudes, and the raw conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an limitless prairie sheeted with compulsive snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some diabolic trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses. But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a bloodless flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael. Tell me, why this strong immature colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon the sunny day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild fleshly muskiness--why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of uncivilized creatures in his immature northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of one-time perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of remote Oregon? No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust. Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milklike sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt! Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystical sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this seeable world seems formed in love, the unseeable spheres were formed in fright. But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more prodigious--why, as we have seen, it is at once the most pregnant symbol of phantasmal things, nay, the identical veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the lily-white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a spacious landscape of snows--a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the innate philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the aureate velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of unseasoned girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually constitutional in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mysterious cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the slap-up principle of light, for ever remains clean or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the miserable infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? CHAPTER 43. Hark!" HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?" It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by the casual flap of a sail, and the regular hum of the unceasingly advancing keel. It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the words above." Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"" Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean?"" There it is again--under the hatches--don't you hear it--a cough--it sounded like a cough."" Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket."" There again--there it is!--it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over, now!"" Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It's the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye--nothing else. Look to the bucket!"" Say what ye will, shipmate; I've penetrative ears."" Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the older Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you're the chap."" Grin away; we'll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our Old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind."" Tish! the bucket!" CHAPTER 44. The Chart. Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that raging ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of xanthous sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with wearisome but steady pencil trace extra courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of former log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on several former voyages of respective ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some inconspicuous pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead. But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul. Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one nongregarious creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in special latitudes; could arrive at fairish surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the well_timed day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey. So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.* *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that rotary, it appears that precisely such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented in the circular. "This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts are 12 columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of which districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen." Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct--say, rather, secret intelligence from the Deity--mostly swim in VEINS, as they are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvelous precision. Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary VEIN in which at these times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more_than or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the ocular sweep from the whale-ship's mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with with_child confidence be looked for. And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the wide-cut expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting. There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his mad but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for special grounds, yet in ecumenical you cannot conclude that the herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances where the obstinate of this has proved true. In general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a early year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Nipponese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some former feeding grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, supererogatory prospects were his, ere a fussy set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the adjacent thing to a certainty. That finicky set time and place were conjoined in the one proficient phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for respective straight years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its one-year round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac older man had found the frightening motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest. Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, dual Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the adjacent ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a many-sided hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodic feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the oblique zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake. But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the panoptic boundless ocean, one nonsocial whale, even if encountered, should be thought up_to of single recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snowy brow of Moby Dick, and his snowy hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear! And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved vengeful desire. He sleeps with clinched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his ain intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became unacceptable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plain tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steady hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the perpetual, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the phrenetic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its ain sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be trusted, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose vivid thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit. So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and rummy particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its early part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still farther and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the born verity of the main points of this affair. I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it--the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself. First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a harpoon, has effected a concluded escape; and, after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been again smitten by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the like private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the upcountry, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this; that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the 2d attack, saw the two irons with the various marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the final time distinctly recognised a singular sort of vast mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three years, but I am pretty certain it was more than that. Here are three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no practiced ground to impeach. Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been various memorable historical instances where a fussy whale in the ocean has been at remote times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily peculiarities as imposing from other whales; for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the disastrous experiences of the fishery there hung a unspeakable prestige of perilousness about such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some inadequate devils ashore that happen to know an short-tempered great man, they make distant unnoticeable salutations to him in the street, 50 if they pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump for their presumption. But not only did each of these celebrated whales enjoy slap-up private celebrity--Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he renowned in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose rarefied jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an honest-to-goodness tortoise with mystical hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classical scholar. But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at several times creating not_bad havoc among the boats of different vessels, were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that express object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that ill-famed homicidal savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip. I do not know where I can find a ripe place than just here, to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem crucial, as in printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires broad as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the patent and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, diachronic and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a flagitious fable, or still bad and more execrable, a horrific and unendurable allegory. First: Though most men have some shadowy flitting ideas of the oecumenical perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, intense conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the literal disasters and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose that that wretched fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan--do you suppose that that pitiable fellow's name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be called steady news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon one fussy voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more_than than one, and three that had each lost a boat's crew. For God's sake, be economic with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it. Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an tremendous creature of tremendous power; but I have ever found that when narrating to them some specific example of this threefold enormousness, they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being tongue-in-cheek than Moses, when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt. But fortunately the particular point I here seek can be established upon testimony entirely autonomous of my own. That point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with lineal aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink a heavy ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale HAS done it. First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, various of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very big whale escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less than "ten minutes" she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the severe exposure, part of the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at final, Captain Pollard once more_than sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the 2d time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.* *The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: "Every fact seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a unretentive interval between them, both of which, according to their direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the accurate manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His aspect was most horrifying, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings." Again: "At all events, the unharmed circumstances taken together, all happening before my ain eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my opinion." Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a dim night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any hospitable shore. "The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the fears of being swallowed up by some fearsome tempest, or dashed upon hidden rocks, with all the former ordinary subjects of frightful contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought; the drear looking wreck, and THE HORRID ASPECT AND REVENGE OF THE WHALE, wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance." In another place--p. 45,--he speaks of "THE MYSTERIOUS AND MORTAL ATTACK OF THE ANIMAL." Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally lost off the Azores by a interchangeable onset, but the veritable particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it. Thirdly: Some 18 or twenty years ago Commodore J---, then commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments' confidential business with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the close port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense. I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern's illustrious Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:" By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the adjacent day we were out in the clear sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwesterly sprang up. An uncommon magnanimous whale, the body of which was magnanimous than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was inconceivable to prevent its outstanding against him. We were thus placed in the most at_hand danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the monster sailing off with the extreme gravity and solemnity. Captain D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured." Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in question, is a new Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of Dorchester near Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a turgid one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home. In that up and down manly book of demode adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders--the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier's former chums--I found a little matter set down so like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a substantiative example, if such be needed. Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando," as he calls the forward-looking Juan Fernandes. "In our way thither," he says, "about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground... .. The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!" Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a enceinte earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an unobserved whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath. I might proceed with various more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and secured there; the whale towing her majuscule hull through the water, as a horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often with unsighted rage, as with self-willed, calculated designs of destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for several straight minutes. But I must be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a noteworthy and most significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most grand event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon--Verily there is nothing new under the sun. In the 6th Christian century lived Procopius, a christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the right authorities, he has always been considered a most trusty and unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently to be mentioned. Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople, a big sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more_than than l years. A fact thus set down in strong history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a tenacious time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present constitution of things, a place for his accustomed gregarious resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis. In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance called BRIT is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale--squid or cuttle-fish--lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but by no means the great of that sort, have been found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning, Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Romanist Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale. CHAPTER 46. Surmises. Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and retentive habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to abandon the verifying prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not wanting former motives much more influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed objectionable, there were still extra considerations which, though not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means unequal_to of swaying him. To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most minded to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the stark spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves cerebral mastership; for to the purely ghostly, the noetic but stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a farseeing interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into opened relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his sterling sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less freakish and undependable--they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness--and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash. Nor was Ahab forgetful of another thing. In times of potent emotion mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent organic condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more_than rough-cut, day-by-day appetites. For even the eminent lifted and knightly Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining former pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one net and romanticistic object--that concluding and romanticistic object, too many would have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash--aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab. Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but secret purpose of the Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely witting that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with staring impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all farther obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most dying to protect himself. That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand, backed by a attentive, closely calculating attention to every minute atmospherical influence which it was potential for his crew to be subjected to. For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a expert degree continue true to the natural, nominative purpose of the Pequod's voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in the cosmopolitan pursuit of his profession. Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward. CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker. It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his ain inconspicuous self. I was the accompanying or page of Queequeg, while in_use at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my ain hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his hard oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my ain shuttle and weave my ain destiny into these changeless threads. Meantime, Queequeg's madcap, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this comfortable, indifferent sword must be chance--aye, chance, free will, and necessity--nowise unsuited--all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course--its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; complimentary will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by costless will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the net featuring blow at events. Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that unbalanced Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be certain the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian's. As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those idle cries announcing their coming." There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"" Where-away?"" On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!" Instantly all was commotion. The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from early tribes of his genus." There go flukes!" was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared." Quick, steward!" cried Ahab. "Time! time!" Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the accurate minute to Ahab. The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the paired quarter--this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers--that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war's men about to throw themselves on board an enemy's ship. But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five swart phantoms that seemed clean formed out of air. CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering. The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting informal the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A tousled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with panoptic black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the primaeval natives of the Manillas;--a race notorious for a sure diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere. While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned onetime man at their head, "All ready there, Fedallah?"" Ready," was the half-hissed reply." Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck. "dispirited away there, I say." Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dextrous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats below. Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a quaternary keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing tumid in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command." Captain Ahab?--" said Starbuck." Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!"" Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his heavy steering oar. "Lay back!" addressing his crew." There!--there!--there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!--lay back!"" Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."" Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now. Didn't I hear'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."" Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my petty ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness. "Why don't you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands come to help us--never mind from where--the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone--devils are well fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men--all hearts alive! Easy, soft; don't be in a hurry--don't be in a hurry. Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so, then:--softly, softly! That's it--that's it! long and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don't ye pull?--pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out! Here!" whipping out the discriminating knife from his girdle; "every mother's son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That's it--that's it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her--start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!" Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at prominent, because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most wondrous things to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so prosperous and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped--open-mouthed at times--that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them. In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across Stubb's bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate." Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye please!"" Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set like a flint from Stubb's." What think ye of those yellowed boys, sir!" Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, inviolable, boys! )" in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out tatty again: "A sad business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads !) but never mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my men, spring !) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys !) Sperm, sperm's the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand."" Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the boats diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on'em, I thought so. Aye, and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale's at the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can't be helped! All right! Give way, men! It ain't the White Whale to-day! Give way!" Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship's company; but Archy's fictitious discovery having some time former got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all manner of furious conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the inscrutable shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatic hintings of the unaccountable Elijah. Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the uttermost to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with even strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the unscathed part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed, while the boat's five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the rearward paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the drab, thus giving no distantly evident token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it." Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck. "Thou, Queequeg, stand up!" Nimbly springing up on the three-sided raised box in the bow, the savage stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the chase had final been descried. Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the Brobdingnagian blue eye of the sea. Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still; its commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its top is not more broad than the palm of a man's hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was total of a declamatory and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post." I can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to that." Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders for a pedestal." Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?"" That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you l feet taller." Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the mammoth negro, stooping a little, presented his matted palm to Flask's foot, and then putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the minuscule man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by. At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what grand habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously contrary and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of minuscule Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more_than odd; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, savage majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his across-the-board back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vibrant, turbulent, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that. Meanwhile Stubb, the 3rd mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a irregular dive from bare fright; and if that were the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!--there they are!" To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of dark-green white water, and slender scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the illogical scud from lily-white rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a tenuous layer of water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted, seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders. All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and air. But it bade middling to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills." Pull, pull, my good boys," said Starbuck, in the abject possible but intense concentrated whisper to his men; while the precipitous fixed glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two seeable needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now abrasive with command, now sonant with entreaty. How different the loud little King-Post. "Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their pitch-black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. Lay me on--lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad! See! see that white water!" And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's stern like a deranged colt from the prairie." Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed after--" He's got fits, that Flask has. Fits? yes, give him fits--that's the identical word--pitch fits into'em. Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;--merry's the word. Pull, babes--pull, sucklings--pull, all. But what the devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your knives in two--that's all. Take it comfortable--why don't ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and lungs!" But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his--these were words good omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the insolent seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey. Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask to "that whale," as he called the fancied monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its tail--these allusions of his were at times so bright and life-like, that they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a cowardly look over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these decisive moments. It was a sight full of speedy wonder and awe! The Brobdingnagian swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an clamant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the polar hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its former side;--all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the grand sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a gaga hen after her screaming brood;--all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his inaugural battle; not the beat man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;--neither of these can feel stranger and strong emotions than that man does, who for the maiden time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale. The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more seeable, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung upon the sea. The jets of vapour no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the row-locks. Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship nor boat to be seen." Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes. There's snowy water again!--close to! Spring!" Soon after, two cries in warm succession on each side of us denoted that the other boats had got libertine; but hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: "Stand up!" and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet. Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the impending instant had come; they heard, too, an tremendous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of infuriated serpents." That's his hump. THERE, THERE, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck. A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed chaotic into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped. Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean. The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the unscathed squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a bloodless fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair. Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly parted by a huge, shadowy form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not much more than its length. Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one insistent it tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip at the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas, and were at net taken up and safely landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the former boats had cut loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,--an oar or a lance pole. CHAPTER 49. The Hyena. There are sure queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this solid universe for a Brobdingnagian pragmatic joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all strong things visible and unseeable, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable one-time joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this devoid and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this unharmed voyage of the Pequod, and the enceinte White Whale its object." Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last-place man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;" Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?" Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen." Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?"" Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn."" Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by; "you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an changeless law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's jaws?"" Can't you twist that small?" said Flask. "Yes, that's the law. I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!" Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the intact case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of usual occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively decisive instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat--oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own unrestrained stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was illustrious for his smashing heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a scratchy draft of my will. "Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee." It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their utmost wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more_than fond of that diversion. This was the 4th time in my marine life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the gentle; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a fresh conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault. Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost. CHAPTER 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah." Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb; "if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he's a tremendous honest-to-god man!"" I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," said Flask." If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and beneficial part of the former left, you know."" I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel." Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that priceless life of his ought to be carried into the fatheaded of the fight. But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every single moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a cosmopolitan thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not. Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt--above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five superfluous men, as that like boat's crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his ain touching all that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be certain when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the wonted business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his ain hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the diminished wooden skewers, which when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an supererogatory coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it unspoiled withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his lone knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this finicky preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the removed suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that boat. Now, with the dependent phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the undefendable sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle. But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow decided from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab's odd fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as cultivated, domesticated people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent--those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's central generations, when the memory of the 1st man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each early as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours. CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout. Days, weeks passed, and under well-to-do sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four various cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena. It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this quondam Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the deathly crew. "There she blows!" Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so telling was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering. Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The good man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her--one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one unrecorded leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this quondam man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time. This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one hale day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and farther in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on. Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas. These impermanent apprehensions, so undefined but so awful, derived a marvellous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its gloomy blandness, some thought there lurked a mephistophelian charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vindictive errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow. But, at final, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the farsighted, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the drear waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more drab than before. Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the deep sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore primed roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the sinister sea, as if its huge tides were a conscience; and the neat mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the longsighted sin and suffering it had bred. Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where hangdog beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that grim air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the nongregarious jet would at times be descried. During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and severe deck, manifested the downhearted reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become virtual fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing idle to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the touch-and-go seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the like muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the previous man's aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling.* *The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the course of the ship. Terrible older man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose. CHAPTER 52. The Albatross. South-eastward from the Cape, off the aloof Crozetts, a near cruising ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries--a whaler at sea, and long lacking from home. As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this ghostly appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rusty, while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her low sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so near to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our ain look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below." Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?" But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance of this threatening incident at the world-class mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed--" Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all succeeding letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to--" At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in accordance with their curious ways, shoals of modest harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a standardised sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings." Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but small in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane honest-to-god man had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his quondam lion voice,--" Up helm! Keep her off round the world!" Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the selfsame point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us. Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in hagridden chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed. CHAPTER 53. The Gam. The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded her--judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions--if so it had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any unknown captain, except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground. If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally barren Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of them, cannot well avoid a reciprocal salutation; and stopping for a moment to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the limitless Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth--off lone Fanning's Island, or the far away King's Mills; how much more innate, I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into still confining, more friendly and sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each early; and consequently, have all sorts of dear domesticated things to talk about. For the farseeing absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward ship would receive the later whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be destined, a thing of the extreme importance to her. And in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing each other's track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they are equally recollective absent from home. For one of them may have received a transfer of letters from some tertiary, and now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an conformable chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils. Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they do occur there is too liable to be a sort of shyness between them; for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American whalers; regarding the long, skimpy Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more_than whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few foibles himself. So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers have most reason to be sociable--and they are so. Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each former's wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a unmarried word of recognition, mutually cutting each former on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in fussy criticism upon each other's rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much sheer hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a exceeding hurry, they run away from each early as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is--" How many skulls?"--the same way that whalers hail--" How many barrels?" And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are satanic villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses. But look at the godly, honest, understated, hospitable, sociable, casual whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a "GAM," a thing so utterly unknown to all early ships that they never heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about "spouters" and "blubber-boilers," and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that remaining fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be mellow lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on. But what is a GAM? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in changeless use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it. GAM. NOUN--A social MEETING OF TWO (OR more) WHALESHIPS, GENERALLY ON A CRUISING-GROUND; WHEN, AFTER EXCHANGING HAILS, THEY EXCHANGE VISITS BY BOATS' CREWS; THE TWO CAPTAINS REMAINING, FOR THE TIME, ON BOARD OF ONE SHIP, AND THE TWO CHIEF MATES ON THE OTHER. There is another small item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here. All professions have their ain slight peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a prosperous, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little milliner's tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty quondam aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a sodding boat's crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number, that dependent is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the unscathed visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is this any very well-off matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the minuscule of his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slim particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his total, floaty self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being generally very orotund, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly vital moment or two, in a sudden squall say--to seize hold of the near oarsman's hair, and hold on there like grim death. CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho's Story. (AS TOLD AT THE GOLDEN INN) The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some famed four corners of a capital highway, where you meet more_than travellers than in any former part. It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, * was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the oecumenical interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a sealed terrific, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own special accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederative lily-white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the total knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the solid of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record. *The ancient whale-cry upon inaugural sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the celebrated Gallipagos terrapin. For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time." Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward from the eaves of this adept Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to day-to-day usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very indisposed to quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all grievous, though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as abject down as was potential in rather toilsome weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at extensive and easy intervals; but no unspoilt luck came; more_than days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the close harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired." Though no little passage was before her, yet, if the vulgar chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps were of the unspoilt, and being periodically projecting at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship gratuitous; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well near the unharmed of this passage being attended by very thriving breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo."'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?' said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass." On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as gravid and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those farming freebooting impressions popularly connected with the assailable ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in tumid part, are shored by two with_child contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of idealistic Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as horrendous as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his paternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our ascetical Atlantic and your broody Pacific; yet was he quite as revengeful and wide of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, sassy from the latitudes of buck-horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some large-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by rigid firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the mean slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made crazy, and Steelkilt--but, gentlemen, you shall hear." It was not more_than than a day or two at the farthermost after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more_than at the pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and cultured ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think fiddling of pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether strange for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any former fair retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a fiddling anxious." Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small-scale concern manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as slight of a coward, and as small inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his ain person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling light water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen--that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in unfaltering spouts at the lee scupper-holes." Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his higher-ranking in ecumenical pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that secondary's tower, and make a lilliputian heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a marvelous and stately animal with a head like a papistical, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last-place viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it." Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings."'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling! I tell ye what, men, older Rad's investment must go for it! he had good cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he's come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of'em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter'em. They're playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he's a dewy-eyed old soul,--Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he'd give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.'"'Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney, pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk.'Thunder away at it!'"'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket.'Lively, boys, lively, now!' And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which denotes the entire tension of life's utmost energies." Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large." Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without beginning washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the strong men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any niggling business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men." But there was more_than than this: the order about the shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any already ireful being--a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valorous men even when aggrieved--this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt." Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the habitual sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done lilliputian or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most domineering and usurious manner unconditionally reiterating his command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper's club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by." Heated and irritated as he was by his fitful toil at the pumps, for all his foremost nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last-place the incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do his bidding." Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not the slight effect, by an awe-inspiring and painful intimation with his twisted hand he warned off the dopy and infatuated man; but it was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:"'Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself.' But the predestinated mate coming still airless to him, where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the enceinte hammer within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions. Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the downhearted jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale." Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their mastheads. They were both Canallers."'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro.'We have seen many whale-ships in our harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are they?'"'Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must have heard of it.'"'Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most otiose, and genetic land, we know but little of your vigorous North.'"'Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story.'" For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of the state of New York; through legion thickly_settled cities and most thriving villages; through long, dreary, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of dandy forests; on Roman arches over Amerind rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the panoptic contrasting scenery of those baronial Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snowy chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupted and often anarchical life. There's your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, future door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities."'Is that a friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded plazza, with humourous concern."'Well for our northerly friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in Lima,' laughed Don Sebastian.'Proceed, Senor.'"'A moment! Pardon!' cried another of the company.'In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast--" Corrupt as Lima." It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever undefended--and "corrupt as Lima." So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark!--St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.'" Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his ain canal, I have received well turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not thankless; but it is often one of the meridian redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as unbendable an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a loaded one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and vernal men born along its line, the provisional life of the Grand Canal furnishes the lonesome transition between quietly reaping in a christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most savage seas."'I see! I see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon his silvery ruffles.'No need to travel! The world's one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.--But the story.'" I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the ropes like ominous comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a misrepresented turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that dreadful scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four orotund casks in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade."'Come out of that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward.'Come out of that, ye cut-throats!'" Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the forged the pistols could do; but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) death would be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too dead_on_target, the captain a little desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty."'Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?' demanded their ringleader."'Turn to! turn to!--I make no promise;--to your duty! Do you want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!' and he once more raised a pistol."'Sink the ship?' cried Steelkilt.'Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say ye, men?' turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response." The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:--'It's not our fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw; ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to yourself; say the word; don't be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us decently, and we're your men; but we won't be flogged.'"'Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!'"'Look ye, now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,'there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row; it's not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won't be flogged.'"'Turn to!' roared the Captain." Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:--'I tell you what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won't lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging us, we don't do a hand's turn.'"'Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there till ye're sick of it. Down ye go.'"'Shall we?' cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave." As the Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called for the steward to bring the big brass padlock belonging to the companionway." Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something down the crack, closed it, and turned the primal upon them--ten in number--leaving on deck some twenty or more_than, who thus far had remained neutral." All night a heads-up watch was kept by all the officers, forward and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dismal night dismally resounded through the ship." At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a upset wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the wonted summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the 5th morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left."'Better turn to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer."'Shut us up again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt."'Oh certainly,' said the Captain, and the central clicked." It was at this point, gentlemen, that infuriated by the defection of seven of his previous associates, and annoyed by the mocking voice that had lowest hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as smutty as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the adjacent summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (longsighted, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the lowest night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in poor but a surrender. And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the filthy play of these miscreants must come out." Upon hearing the excited project of their leader, each in his own separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be the inaugural of the three, though the utmost of the ten, to surrender; and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead them to the concluding, they in some way, by some elusive chemistry of villany, mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight." Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the sinister for the blood, he and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his treacherous allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till morning.'Damn ye,' cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them,'the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!'" At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a secure mind to flog them all round--thought, upon the whole, he would do so--he ought to--justice demanded it; but for the present, considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular."'But as for you, ye carrion rogues,' turning to the three men in the rigging--'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;' and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn."'My wrist is sprained with ye!' he cried, at utmost;'but there is still rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give up. Take that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.'" For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a quavering motion of his cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss,'What I say is this--and mind it well--if you flog me, I murder you!'"'Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me'--and the Captain drew off with the rope to strike."'Best not,' hissed the Lakeman."'But I must,'--and the rope was once more_than drawn back for the stroke." Steelkilt here hissed out something, unhearable to all but the Captain; who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said,'I won't do it--let him go--cut him down: d'ye hear?'" But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man, with a bandaged head, arrested them--Radney the chief mate. Ever since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his pinioned foe."'You are a coward!' hissed the Lakeman."'So I am, but take that.' The mate was in the selfsame act of striking, when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing no more, made expert his word, spite of Steelkilt's threat, whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as before." Just after dark-skinned that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own instance they were put down in the ship's run for salvation. Still, no sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved to maintain the rigorous peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the quick end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing--namely, not to sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For, spite of her leak, and spite of all her former perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as uncoerced to low for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bound mouth seek to gag in death the life-sustaining jaw of the whale." But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all was over) concerning his ain proper and private revenge upon the man who had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief mate's watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more_than than half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge." During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side. In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his succeeding trick at the helm would come round at two o'clock, in the morning of the 3rd day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his watches below."'What are you making there?' said a shipmate."'What do you think? what does it look like?'"'Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an unpaired one, seems to me.'"'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length before him;'but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough twine,--have you any?'" But there was none in the forecastle."'Then I must get some from honest-to-goodness Rad;' and he rose to go aft."'You don't mean to go a begging to HIM!' said a sailor."'Why not? Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help himself in the end, shipmate?' and going to the mate, he looked at him quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given him--neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman's monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow. twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm--near to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to the seaman's hand--that fateful hour was then to come; and in the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already double-dyed and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in." But, gentlemen, a fool saved the manque murderer from the bloody deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the avenger. For by a mystical fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its ain the damning thing he would have done." It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the 2nd day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out,'There she rolls! there she rolls!' Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick."'Moby Dick!' cried Don Sebastian;'St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?'"'A very clean, and celebrated, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;--but that would be too long a story.'"'How? how?' cried all the young Spaniards, crowding."'Nay, Dons, Dons--nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, Sirs.'"'The chicha! the chicha!' cried Don Pedro;'our vigorous friend looks faint;--fill up his empty glass!'" No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.--Now, gentlemen, so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship--forgetful of the compact among the crew--in the excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted his voice for the monster, though for some small time past it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.'The White Whale--the White Whale!' was the cry from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by horrific rumours, were all unquiet to capture so illustrious and precious a fish; while the tenacious crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the huge milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the low-spirited morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the hale career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when degraded to a fish, it was his duty to sit succeeding him, while Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate's got the start; and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got degraded, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a wild man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bound cry was, to beach him on the whale's topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray, and, for an insistent, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down." Meantime, at the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his ain thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared." In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port--a savage, nongregarious place--where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor." The ship's company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called upon the Islanders to assist him in the toilsome business of heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over their dangerous allies was this little band of whites necessitated, both by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a vitiated condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so hard a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the ship as far off shore as potential; loaded and ran out his two cannon from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with him, and setting the sail of his beneficial whale-boat, steered straight before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles remote, to procure a reinforcement to his crew." On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam."'What do you want of me?' cried the captain."'Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt;'no lies.'"'I am bound to Tahiti for more men.'"'Very good. Let me board you a moment--I come in peace.' With that he leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with the captain."'Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightning strike me!'"'A pretty scholar,' laughed the Lakeman.'Adios, Senor!' and leaping into the sea, he swam back to his comrades." Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in referable time arrived at Tahiti, his ain place of destination. There, luck befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the start of their erstwhile captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution." Some ten days after the Gallic ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more genteel Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all right there, again resumed his cruisings." Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its utter; still in dreams sees the terrible livid whale that destroyed him."'Are you through?' said Don Sebastian, quietly."'I am, Don.'"'Then I entreat you, tell me if to the good of your own convictions, this your story is in substance really lawful? It is so passing marvellous! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press.'"'Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian's suit,' cried the company, with exceeding interest."'Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?'"'Nay,' said Don Sebastian;'but I know a worthy priest near by, who will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised? this may grow too serious.'"'Will you be so salutary as to bring the priest also, Don?'"'Though there are no Auto-da-Fe's in Lima now,' said one of the company to another;'I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.'"'Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that you will be particular in procuring the big sized Evangelists you can.'"'This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,' said Don Sebastian, gravely, returning with a magniloquent and earnest figure."'Let me remove my hat. Now, august priest, further into the light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it."'So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in substance and its large items, true. I know it to be true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.'" CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales. I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his ain absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those rummy imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong. It may be that the aboriginal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among the old Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's; ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not only in most democratic pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him. Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to be found in the noted cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every imaginable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a freestanding department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the blanket palms of the genuine whale's lofty flukes. But go to the former Galleries, and look now at a enceinte christian painter's portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no well than the antiquated Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his ain "Perseus Descending," make out one whit better. The Brobdingnagian corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors' Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of quondam Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah's whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of Old primers. What shall be said of these? As for the book-binder's whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor--as stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both onetime and new--that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the fifteenth century, during the Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan. In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with very singular touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original edition of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some curious whales. But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In quondam Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with clean bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the exceptional blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes. Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries." In this book is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck." I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye! Nor are the most scrupulous compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the untried and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that popular work "Goldsmith's Animated Nature." In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "whale" and a "narwhale." I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys. Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a majuscule naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a tenacious experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature. But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the far-famed Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had good provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Formosan drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us. As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats total of mariners: their deformities floundering in seas of blood and bluish paint. But these multiplex mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the stately fleshly itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and undirected the huge bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally insufferable for deadly man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly supposable difference of contour between a new sucking whale and a big Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those new sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch. But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more queer things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very picayune idea of his worldwide shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian sometime gentleman, with all Jeremy's former leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the keen Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded carnal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their overweight covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said humourous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens." For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much approximate than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a adequate idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no diminished risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had just not be too exacting in your curiosity touching this Leviathan. CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes. In connexion with the grotesque pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and mod, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass that matter by. I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far better than theirs; but, by nifty odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's drawings of this whale are undecomposed, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales in assorted attitudes, capping his second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably right and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though. Of the Right Whale, the good outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are drawn on too modest a scale to convey a suitable impression. He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living hunters. But, taken for all in all, by far the hunky-dory, though in some details not the most right, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the marvelous wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing in that prow, for that one exclusive inestimable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of the hale thing is wonderfully dear and true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the smuggled stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a one. In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a big running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like some stick-in-the-mud rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are vertical, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking in the cracking bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of turbulent clean curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole. Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was either practically familiar with his subject, or else marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that jubilant hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the back-to-back not_bad battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the sequential armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery. The lifelike aptitude of the Gallic for seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England's experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the lonesome ruined sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen seem entirely contented with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving us a steadfast wide-cut length of the Greenland whale, and three or four touchy miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classic engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of enlarged frigid snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honour him for a veteran), but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace. In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two early French engravings desirable of note, by some one who subscribes himself" H. Durand." One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on former accounts. It is a hushed noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The early engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the picayune craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to windward, a opprobrious cloud, rising up with heartfelt of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen. CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars. On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or KEDGER, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the world-class whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are as serious whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the short whaleman make; but, with gloomy eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his ain amputation. Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and early like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous footling cunning contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost almighty tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy. Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him. Now, one of the rummy characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his rattling patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost unfluctuating years of steady application. As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the like marvelous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as penny-pinching packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine older Dutch savage, Albert Durer. Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy. At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy-eyed, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom noteworthy as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-hat churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with "HANDS OFF!" you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit. In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in wild groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of fleeceable surges. Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatric heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the precise intersecting latitude and longitude of your maiden stand-point, else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would require a heavy re-discovery; like the Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and former Figuera chronicled them. Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out bang-up whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the shining points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish. With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the upmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight! CHAPTER 58. Brit. Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with huge meadows of brit, the minute, sensationalistic substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat. On the 2nd day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that terrific Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip. As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of boggy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of downhearted upon the sensationalistic sea.* *That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks" does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows and soundings there, but because of this noteworthy meadow-like appearance, caused by the Brobdingnagian drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased. But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused and were stationary for a while, their immense black forms looked more_than like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the bully hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for the foremost time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse. Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some Old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea; and though taking a tolerant general view of the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear relative analogy to him. But though, to landsmen in cosmopolitan, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one trivial western one; though, by Brobdingnagian odds, the most wondrous of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the baronial, rigid frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it. The beginning boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Lusitanian vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last-place year. Yea, gooselike mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the comely world it yet covers. Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon the early? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his company the lively ground opened and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a Modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the like manner the unrecorded sea swallows up ships and crews. But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his ain guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mighty whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a brainsick battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe. Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most horrific creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the lovely tints of azure. Consider also the diabolical brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on perpetual war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to this light-green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, entire of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! CHAPTER 59. Squid. Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet would be seen. But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost uncanny spread over the sea, however unattended with any dead calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a prosperous finger laid across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head. In the distance, a big white-hot mass lazily rose, and rising high-pitched and high, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, New slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled out--" There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!" Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo. Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and lone jet had gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the world-class sight of the particular whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave orders for lowering. The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most terrific phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, infinite long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. As with a depressed sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a gaga voice exclaimed--" Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"" What was it, Sir?" said Flask." The cracking hot squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it." But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as silently following. Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be the large animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his lone food. For though former species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it. There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the unbelievable bulk he assigns it. By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the inscrutable creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in sure external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe. CHAPTER 60. The Line. With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the good understanding of all standardized scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the witching, sometimes frightful whale-line. The line originally used in the fishery was of the adept hemp, slightly vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of average ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more_than convenient to the sailor for coarse ship use; yet, not only would the average quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it may give it compactness and gloss. Of tardy years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so lasting as hemp, it is inviolable, and far more soft and pliable; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more openhanded and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a twilight, drear fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold. The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so unassailable as it really is. By experiment its one and 50 yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly adequate to three tons. In length, the unwashed sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or layers of homocentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart," or minute upright tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or intact body off, the uttermost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an intact morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to destitute it from all possible wrinkles and twists. In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the like line being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this; because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a portentous great wedding-cake to present to the whales. Both ends of the line are exposed; the abject end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the low end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the early; though the maiden boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the humiliated end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again. Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the diametrical gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a vernacular quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp--the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but late to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too wearisome to detail. Thus the whale-line folds the solid boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Native_American jugglers, with the pestilent snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of deadly woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these frightful contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit--strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?--Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say. Perhaps a very trivial thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling disasters--some few of which are casually chronicled--of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is bad; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the svelte warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out. Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more abominable than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fateful powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the elegant repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into real play--this is a thing which carries more of genuine terror than any other aspect of this unsafe affair. But why say more_than? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side. CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale. If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different object." When you see him'quid," said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted boat, "then you quick see him'parm whale." The future day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing extra to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords few glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru. It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which foremost moved it is withdrawn. Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at utmost all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide_of_the_mark trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all. Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, nice agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not xl fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glistening back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, pitiable whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more_than than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the heavy fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air." Clear away the boats! Luff!" cried Ahab. And obeying his ain order, he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes. The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such a firm tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up." There go flukes!" was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb's producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the good interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker's boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault. Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alert to his jeopardy, he was going "head out"; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he brewed.* *It will be seen in some other place of what a very scant substance the intact interior of the sperm whale's tremendous head consists. Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most perky part about him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the scurvy part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed dull galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat." Start her, start her, my men! Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty of time--but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that's all," cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. "Start her, now; give'em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy--start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool--cucumbers is the word--easy, gentle--only start her like dispirited death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys--that's all. Start her!"" Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!" screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one terrible leading stroke which the eager Indian gave. But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. "Kee-hee! Kee-hee!" yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage." Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard--" Stand up, Tashtego!--give it to him!" The harpoon was hurled. "Stern all!" The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was the charming line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two extra turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased speedy circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the regular fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb's hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch." Wet the line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed places--stem for stern--a stupefying business truly in that rocking commotion. *Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with water; in many early ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient. From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat, and from its now being more_than compressed than a harpstring, you would have thought the craft had two keels--one cleaving the water, the former the air--as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at once. A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the svelte motion from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the magniloquent form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost forked, in order to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight." Haul in--haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another fling. The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like cherry-red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale." Pull up--pull up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath. "Pull up!--airless to!" and the boat ranged along the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his tenacious sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was awful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that painful thing called his "flurry," the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in heavy, harebrained, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day. And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonised respirations. At concluding, gush after gush of clogged red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!" He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo." Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the Brobdingnagian corpse he had made. CHAPTER 62. The Dart. A word concerning an incident in the final chapter. According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as impermanent steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to strike the initiatory iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a prospicient dart, the expectant implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started--what that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry--" Stand up, and give it to him!" He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are wanting four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted! Again, if the dart be successful, then at the 2d decisive instant, that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the impendent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the small craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat. Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both goosy and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from initiatory to last-place; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in versatile whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the Brobdingnagian majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them. To insure the sterling efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil. CHAPTER 63. The Crotch. Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters. The crotch alluded to on a former page deserves independent mention. It is a toothed stick of a singular form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the foremost and 2nd irons. But these two harpoons, each by its ain cord, are both connected with the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly after the early into the same whale; so that if, in the coming drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the foremost iron, it becomes unimaginable for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the 2d iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line, and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the most dreadful jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended with the sorry and most fatal casualties. Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a exceeding sensation in all directions. Nor, in universal, is it potential to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse. Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate respective most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted. CHAPTER 64. Stubb's Supper. Stubb's whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the sluggish business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men with our xxxvi arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals; effective evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved. For, upon the smashing canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk. Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of various more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning. Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his habitual activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod's decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the Brobdingnagian corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel's and seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two--ship and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.* *A little item may as well be related here. The inviolable and most true hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes or tail; and as from its bully density that part is relatively profound than any former (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, unattackable line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the early end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the former side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the small part of the tail, at the point of junction with its panoptic flukes or lobes. If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his 2nd mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One humble, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a eminent liver; he was somewhat intemperately lovesome of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate." A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his minuscule!" Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a universal thing, and according to the peachy military maxim, make the enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for that exceptional part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body. About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his ain mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, sinister waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out immense globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. This finicky feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such proportionate mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may expert be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw. Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the idle meat; and though, were you to turn the unscathed affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jocund spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil. But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so near him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips." Cook, cook!--where's that honest-to-god Fleece?" he cried at length, widening his legs still farther, as if to form a more safe base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; "cook, you cook!--sail this way, cook!" The erstwhile black, not in any very eminent glee at having been previously roused from his warm hammock at a most wrong hour, came shambling along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this Old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this Old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a all_in stop on the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arciform back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his in_force ear into play." Cook," said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, "don't you think this steak is rather overdone? You've been beating this steak too much, cook; it's too tender. Don't I always say that to be safe, a whale-steak must be knotty? There are those sharks now over the side, don't you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to'em; tell'em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and deliver my message. Here, take this lantern," snatching one from his sideboard; "now then, go and preach to'em!" Sullenly taking the offered lantern, previous Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light broken over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the early hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said." Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin' ob de lips! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!"" Cook," here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the shoulder,--" Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear that way when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, cook!"" Who dat? Den preach to him yourself," sullenly turning to go." No, cook; go on, go on."" Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:"--" Right!" exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax'em to it; try that," and Fleece continued." Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness--'top dat dam slappin' ob de tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and bitin' dare?"" Cook," cried Stubb, collaring him, "I won't have that swearing. Talk to'em gentlemanly." Once more the sermon proceeded." Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de minor bellies; so dat de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber for de little fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves."" Well done, one-time Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity; go on."" No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a scougin' and slappin' each oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear one word; no use a-preaching to such dam g'uttons as you call'em, till dare bellies is full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get'em entire, dey wont hear you den; for den dey sink in the sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can't hear noting at all, no more, for eber and eber."" Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece, and I'll away to my supper." Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his shrill voice, and cried--" Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam bellies'till dey bust--and den die."" Now, cook," said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; "stand just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay exceptional attention."" All'dention," said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the desired position." Well," said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; "I shall now go back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you, cook?"" What dat do wid de'teak," said the old black, testily." Silence! How old are you, cook?""'Bout ninety, dey say," he gloomily muttered." And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and don't know yet how to cook a whale-steak?" rapidly bolting another mouthful at the terminal word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the question. "Where were you born, cook?""'Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin' ober de Roanoke."" Born in a ferry-boat! That's queer, too. But I want to know what country you were born in, cook!"" Didn't I say de Roanoke country?" he cried sharply." No, you didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what I'm coming to, cook. You must go home and be born over again; you don't know how to cook a whale-steak yet."" Bress my soul, if I cook noder one," he growled, angrily, turning round to depart." Come back here, cook;--here, hand me those tongs;--now take that bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be? Take it, I say"--holding the tongs towards him--" take it, and taste it." Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro muttered, "right cooked'teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy."" Cook," said Stubb, squaring himself once more; "do you belong to the church?"" Passed one once in Cape-Down," said the Old man sullenly." And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and tell me such a frightening lie as you did just now, eh?" said Stubb. "Where do you expect to go to, cook?"" Go to bed berry soon," he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke." Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It's an awe-inspiring question. Now what's your answer?"" When dis old brack man dies," said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and demeanor, "he hisself won't go nowhere; but some bressed angel will come and fetch him."" Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him where?"" Up dere," said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very solemnly." So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you are dead? But don't you know the high you climb, the colder it gets? Main-top, eh?"" Didn't say dat t'all," said Fleece, again in the sulks." You said up there, didn't you? and now look yourself, and see where your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the lubber's hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don't get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It's a touchy business, but must be done, or else it's no go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t'other a'top of your heart, when I'm giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?--that's your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!--that's it--now you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention."" All'dention," said the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time." Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have put it out of sight as soon as potential; you see that, don't you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a alive coal to it with the early; that done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go." But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled." Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D'ye hear? away you sail, then.--Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.--Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast--don't forget."" Wish, by gor! whale eat him,'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the sure-enough man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock. CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish. That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so freakish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it. It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a expectant delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a sure cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. The sure-enough monks of Dunfermline were very doting of them. They had a dandy porpoise grant from the crown. The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a baronial dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime Old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most illustrious doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel--that these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called "fritters"; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable look that the most self-sacrificing stranger can hardly keep his hands off. But what further depreciates the whale as a civilised dish, is his exceeding richness. He is the groovy prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a self-coloured pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third month of its growth, yet far too plenteous to supply a substitute for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the foresighted try watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the vast oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made. In the case of a modest Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, milky lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most toothsome mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and every one knows that some vernal bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their ain, so as to be capable to tell a calf's head from their ain heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow one of the deplorable sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an "Et tu Brute!" expression. It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively buttery that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its ain light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more adequate for the Fejee that salted down a skimpy missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras. But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own unclouded, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother of the selfsame ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that rich goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the final month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronise nothing but steel pens. CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre. When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, wonted to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly hard one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the usual usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a'lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well. But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be seeable by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their rattling voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still outstanding activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the unhurt round sea was one vast cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it. Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no modest excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of unclouded over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an unceasing murdering of the sharks, * by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about New revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each early's disembowelments, but like pliable bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their identical joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. *The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very good steel; is about the bigness of a man's spread hand; and in world-wide shape, corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly compressed, and its upper end considerably narrow than the lower. This weapon is always kept as penetrating as potential; and when being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle." Queequeg no care what god made him shark," said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; "wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin." CHAPTER 67. Cutting In. It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods. In the world-class place, the tremendous cutting tackles, among early ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift--this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the scummy mast-head, the strong point anywhere above a ship's deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, and the Brobdingnagian lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the not_bad blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their tenacious spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the near of the two side-fins. This done, a wide, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at final, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the "scarf," simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as debauched as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted gamy and high aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the exceptional blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take honest heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard. One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the scurvy part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the 2d alternating cracking tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows. Whereupon, this completed swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few asquint, do-or-die, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so that while the short lower part is still fast, the foresighted upper strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a 2d strip from the whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry agile hands keep coiling away the farseeing blanket-piece as if it were a great springy mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the universal friction. CHAPTER 68. The Blanket. I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion. The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness. Now, however ridiculous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thin shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexile and soft as satin; that is, premature to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have respective such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the intact body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ludicrous to say, that the proper skin of the marvelous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this. Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very heavy Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the integral substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a simple part of whose bare integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the nett weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale's skin. In life, the seeable surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the okay Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observing eye, those elongate marks, as in a authentic engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mystic cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my tenacious memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the erstwhile Indian characters chiselled on the noted hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more_than especially his flanks, effaced in large part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with immense floating icebergs--I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with former whales; for I have most remarked them in the tumid, adult bulls of the species. A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in recollective pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very well-chosen and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a tangible blanket or counterpane; or, still upright, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, early fish are found exceedingly fresh in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wondrous is it then--except after explanation--that this bang-up monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as essential as it is to man; how howling that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more_than surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer. It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a potent single vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of upcountry spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. But how gentle and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few immense as the whale! CHAPTER 69. The Funeral. Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern! The huge tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more_than away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiable sharks, and the air above vexed with predatory flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that swell mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives. There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, frightful vultureism of earth! from which not the mighty whale is free. Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vindictive ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some diffident man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the clean mass floating in the sun, and the snowy spray heaving gamy against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log--SHOALS, ROCKS, AND BREAKERS HEREABOUTS: BEWARE! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of quondam beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy! Thus, while in life the expectant whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world. Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them. CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx. It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason. Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that very place, is the chummy part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterranean manner, without so much as getting one undivided peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear-cut of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale? When 1st severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a diminished whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a total grown leviathan this is insufferable; for the sperm whale's head embraces nearly one 3rd of his intact bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales. The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in not_bad part be buoyed up by its aboriginal element. And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the blue mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the elephantine Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith. When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more_than and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea. A brusque space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb's long spade--still remaining there after the whale's Decapitation--and spectacular it into the low-down part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head. It was a pitch-dark and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that painful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; unfeigned to each former, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"" Sail ho!" cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head." Aye? Well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow." That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a proficient man.--Where away?"" Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!" Better and respectable, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the small atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam's Story. Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came fast than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock. By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mast-heads proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting by, apparently making a passage to some former ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would be made. Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals being collected in a book with the names of the various vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to recognise each early upon the ocean, even at considerable distances and with no small facility. The Pequod's signal was at terminal responded to by the stranger's setting her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod's lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew near; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat's stern in token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod's company. For, though himself and boat's crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the Pequod. But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam's boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the sudden onset of a orotund rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not without still another interruption of a very different sort. Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even in that wild whaling life where case-by-case notabilities make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatical delirium was in his eyes. So soon as this figure had been maiden descried, Stubb had exclaimed--" That's he! that's he!--the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho's company told us of!" Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time former when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in question had gained a wondrous ascendency over almost everybody in the Jeroboam. His story was this: He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had been a with_child prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having respective times descended from heaven by the way of a trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolical whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he declared these things;--the glum, daring play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of actual delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the nescient crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship, especially as he refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that item-by-item's intention was to land him in the 1st convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials--devoting the ship and all hands to categorical perdition, in case this intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew, that at terminal in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass that Gabriel had the everlasting freedom of the ship. The consequence of all this was, that the archangel cared niggling or nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a high hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such things may seem unbelievable; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the rabid himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to return to the Pequod." I fear not thy epidemic, man," said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain Mayhew, who stood in the boat's stern; "come on board." But now Gabriel started to his feet." Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrifying plague!"" Gabriel! Gabriel!" cried Captain Mayhew; "thou must either--" But that instantaneous a hasty wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech." Hast thou seen the White Whale?" demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back." Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!"" I tell thee again, Gabriel, that--" But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of turbulent waves rolled by, which by one of those periodic caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale's head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to warrant. When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him. It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many parlous, stillborn onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat's bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! a tolerant white shadow rose from the sea; by its agile, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of wild life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about 50 yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman's head; but the mate for ever sank. It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But strange of all is the circumstance, that in more_than instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a exclusive mark of violence is observable; the man being stark dead. The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek--" The vial! the vial!" Gabriel called off the terror-struck crew from the further hunting of the whale. This atrocious event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship. Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which Ahab answered--" Aye." Straightway, then, Gabriel once more_than started to his feet, glaring upon the former man, and vehemently exclaimed, with down pointed finger--" Think, think of the blasphemer--dead, and down there!--beware of the blasphemer's end!" Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, "Captain, I have just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag." Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for versatile ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the bare chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two or three years or more. Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a thudding, spotted, unripened mould, in consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy." Can'st not read it?" cried Ahab. "Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it's but a dim scrawl;--what's this?" As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly fragmented the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without its coming any closer to the ship. Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, "Mr. Har--yes, Mr. Harry--(a woman's pinny hand,--the man's wife, I'll wager)--Aye--Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;--why it's Macey, and he's deadened!"" Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife," sighed Mayhew; "but let me have it."" Nay, keep it thyself," cried Gabriel to Ahab; "thou art soon going that way."" Curses throttle thee!" yelled Ahab. "Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive it"; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck's hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted a little towards the ship's stern; so that, as if by charming, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand. He clutched it in an insistent, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod. As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair. CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope. In the riotous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale's back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so ill-chosen and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster's back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the unscathed flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the quick parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the pitiful harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the Brobdingnagian mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume--a shirt and socks--in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a good chance to observe him, as will presently be seen. Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the beat whale's back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a farseeing cord. Just so, from the ship's steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist. It was a humorously touch-and-go business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was loyal at both ends; fast to Queequeg's panoptic canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for well or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Thai ligature united us. Queequeg was my ain inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the life-threatening liabilities which the hempen bond entailed. So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering--while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him--still farther pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or early, has this Tai connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the uncounted early malefic chances of life. But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.* *The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strong possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder. I have hinted that I would often jerk short Queequeg from between the whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall, from the unremitting rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the lonesome jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow from the carcass--the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive. And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether unbelievable were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man. Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravening finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look needlelike to them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the piteous fellow from too skinny a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly furious shark--he was provided with still another protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach. This procedure of theirs, to be indisputable, was very disinterested and charitable of them. They meant Queequeg's honest happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a tail. But piteous Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there with that outstanding iron hook--poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods. Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea--what matters it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a pitiful pickle and peril, wretched lad. But courage! there is beneficial cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with disconsolate lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at final climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward advances, and with a good-hearted, consolatory glance hands him--what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water!" Ginger? Do I smell gingery?" suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near." Yes, this must be ginger," peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astounded steward slowly saying, "Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of gingery? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!--what the devil is ginger? Sea-coal? firewood?--lucifer matches?--tinder?--gunpowder?--what the devil is gingery, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here."" There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business," he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. "Will you look at that kannakin, sir; smell of it, if you please." Then watching the mate's countenance, he added, "The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?"" I trust not," said Starbuck, "it is wretched stuff enough."" Aye, aye, steward," cried Stubb, "we'll teach you to drug a harpooneer; none of your apothecary's medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?"" It was not me," cried Dough-Boy, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this ginger-jub--so she called it."" Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain's orders--grog for the harpooneer on a whale."" Enough," replied Starbuck, "only don't hit him again, but--"" Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort; and this fellow's a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?"" Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself." When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dreary flask in one hand, and a sort of tea-caddy in the other. The world-class contained potent spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity's gift, and that was freely given to the waves. CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him. It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale's olympian head hanging to the Pequod's side. But we must let it continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For the present early matters press, and the good we can do now for the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold. Now, during the retiring night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave strange tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those subscript creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered. Nor was this tenacious wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats, Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further away, they at last became almost unseeable to the men at the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a corking heap of riotous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel. "Cut, cut!" was the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side. But having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the like time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was intensely decisive; for while they still slacked out the tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were gratis to fly. But the spent whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a sodding circuit. Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale's body, rushed to the novel blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every fresh gash, as the eager Israelites did at the raw bursting fountains that poured from the smitten rock. At last his spout grew thick, and with a atrocious roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse. While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in former ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between them." I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of filthy lard," said Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so ungentle a leviathan." Wants with it?" said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat's bow," did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale's head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale's on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards capsize?"" Why not?" I don't know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know all about ships' charms. But I sometimes think he'll charm the ship to no good at last. I don't half like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake's head, Stubb?"" Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a dreary night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down there, Flask"--pointing into the sea with a curious motion of both hands--" Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been stowed away on board ship? He's the devil, I say. The reason why you don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of it, he's always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots."" He sleeps in his boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock; but I've seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging."" No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the rigging."" What's the older man have so much to do with him for?"" Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose."" Bargain?--about what?"" Why, do ye see, the honest-to-god man is surd bent after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he'll surrender Moby Dick."" Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?"" I don't know, Flask, but the devil is a rummy chap, and a impish one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the erstwhile flag-ship once, switching his tail about rascally easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the erstwhile governor was at home. Well, he was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, up and says,'I want John.''What for?' says the old governor.'What business is that of yours,' says the devil, getting mad,--'I want to use him.''Take him,' says the governor--and by the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp--ain't you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get the whale alongside."" I think I remember some such story as you were telling," said Flask, when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship, "but I can't remember where."" Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three cantankerous soladoes? Did ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?"" No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the like you say is now on board the Pequod?"" Am I the like man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live for ever; who ever heard that the devil was drained? Did you ever see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?"" How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?"" Do you see that mainmast there?" pointing to the ship; "well, that's the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod's hold, and string along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that wouldn't begin to be Fedallah's age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn't show hoops enough to make oughts enough."" But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a practiced chance. Now, if he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard--tell me that?" Give him a unspoiled ducking, anyhow."" But he'd crawl back."" Duck him again; and keep ducking him."" Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though--yes, and drown you--what then?"" I should like to see him try it; I'd give him such a pair of calamitous eyes that he wouldn't dare to show his face in the admiral's cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask; so you suppose I'm afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn't catch him and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a governor!"" Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?"" Do I suppose it? You'll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep a acute look-out on him; and if I see anything very funny going on, I'll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say--Look here, Beelzebub, you don't do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I'll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump--do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he'll sneak off without the pitiful satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs."" And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?"" Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;--what else?"" Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?"" Mean or not average, here we are at the ship." The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him." Didn't I tell you so?" said Flask; "yes, you'll soon see this right whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti's." In good time, Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very wretched plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float wanton and right. In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off unscathed, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers. Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his ain hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing things. CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale's Head--Contrasted View. Here, now, are two peachy whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own. Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the sole whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the outside difference between them is mainly discernible in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like to know, will you obtain a good chance to study practical cetology than here? In the world-class place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads. Both are monumental enough in all conscience; but there is a sure numerical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit, giving token of sophisticated age and big experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a "gray-headed whale." Let us now note what is least unalike in these heads--namely, the two most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a untested colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head. Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the unbowed side-line of sight; and about thirty more_than behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking uncoiled towards you, with dagger uplifted in wide day, you would not be able-bodied to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man--what, indeed, but his eyes? Moreover, while in most former animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a smashing mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two decided windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes. A rum and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man's eyes are receptive in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite insufferable for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things--however turgid or however little--at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to disjoined these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your modern-day consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the former in an exactly diametrical direction? If he can, then is it as grand a thing in him, as if a man were capable simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison. It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so uncouth to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them. But the ear of the whale is wide as peculiar as the eye. If you are an total stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no extraneous leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without. Is it not rum, that so Brobdingnagian a being as the whale should see the world through so minor an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is lowly than a hare's? But if his eyes were extensive as the lens of Herschel's corking telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharp of hearing? Not at all.--Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it. Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over the sperm whale's head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. But come out now, and look at this pontifical lower jaw, which seems like the farsighted narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a grand portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a misfortunate wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more dreadful is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sluggish whale, floating there suspended, with his stupendous jaw, some 15 feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him. In most cases this dispirited jaw--being easily unhinged by a practised artist--is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of rum articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips. With a long, aweary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor; and when the proper time comes--some few days after the former work--Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all completed dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a sharp cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of violent wood lands. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our stilted fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses. CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale's Head--Contrasted View. Crossing the deck, let us now have a estimable long look at the Right Whale's head. As in world-wide shape the imposing Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a wide view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an previous Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And in this same final or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny. But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass--this unripe, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the "crown," and the Southern fishers the "bonnet" of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some immense oak, with a bird's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those unrecorded crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term "crown" also bestowed upon it; in which case you will take peachy interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging low lip! what a Brobdingnagian sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more. A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an significant interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about dozen feet high-pitched, and runs to a pretty shrill angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those grand, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the cardinal blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are sure funny marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its round rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at inaugural glance will seem reasonable. In honest-to-god times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the fantastic" whiskers" inside of the whale's mouth; * another, "hogs' bristles"; a 3rd Old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:" There are about two hundred and l fins growing on each side of his upper CHOP, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth." *This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of the outer end of the abject jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance. As every one knows, these like "hogs' bristles," "fins," "whiskers,"" blinds," or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances. But in this special, the demand has long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the like bone. But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale's mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the swell Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the soft Turkey--the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting it on deck. This finicky tongue now before us; at a passing glance I should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that amount of oil. Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with--that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale's there is no neat well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a downcast jaw, like the Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one. Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very retentive in following. Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be good of a prairie-like placidity, born of a questioning indifference as to death. But mark the other head's expression. See that amazing low lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this unanimous head seem to speak of an tremendous virtual resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram. Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale's head, I would have you, as a sensible physiologist, simply--particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there. Here is a life-sustaining point; for you must either satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less genuine events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded history. You observe that in the average swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water; you observe that the depleted part of that front slopes considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your ain mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he has--his spout hole--is on the top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one tertiary of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, low, backward sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. So that this whole tremendous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise the most touchy oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the substance which so impregnably invests all that unmistakable effeminacy. In some former place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The dangerous pointed harpoon, the sharp lance darted by the strong human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it. Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two big, loaded Indiamen chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold there a orotund, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest and bad of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise incomprehensible manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it eminent sublime out of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope; considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those orphic lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes. Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, conceptive, uninjurable wall, and this most chirpy thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of rattling life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is--by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the small insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all illiterate incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear-cut Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how low the chances for the provincials then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Lais? CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun. Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the funny intragroup structure of the thing operated upon. Regarding the Sperm Whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an prepared plane, sideways divide it into two quoins, * whereof the modest is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an fulsome mass wholly barren from bones; its broad forward end forming the expanded erect apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two almost adequate parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal wall of a thick sinewy substance. *Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a self-coloured which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the unconscionable inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides. The modest subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough pliant white fibres throughout its unscathed extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the heavy Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that celebrated cracking tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale's immense plaited forehead forms unnumberable strange devices for the symbolical adornment of his tremendous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most splendid of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and sweet-smelling state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly smooth, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the beginning flimsy delicate ice is just forming in water. A with_child whale's case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from inescapable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can. I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale's case. It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since--as has been elsewhere set forth--the head embraces one tertiary of the unharmed length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for a sound sized whale, you have more_than than twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's side. As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, l a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its priceless contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the tremendous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter. Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that tall and--in this peculiar instance--almost fateful operation whereby the Sperm Whale's enceinte Heidelburgh Tun is tapped. CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets. Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a loose tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There--still high elevated above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries--he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A short-handled piercing spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some Old house, sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up a very prospicient pole. Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail of fresh milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a big tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the like round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his farsighted pole harder and heavy, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down. Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way; several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that tempestuous Amerind, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was so punic and oozing; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! piteous Tashtego--like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this outstanding Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrifying oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!" Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first came to his senses. "Swing the bucket this way!" and putting one foot into it, so as the just to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him gamy up to the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, there was a frightful tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the miserable Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the parlous depth to which he had sunk. At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing the whip--which had somehow got filthy of the corking cutting tackles--a precipitous cracking noise was heard; and to the awful horror of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast vibration the tremendous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of giving way; an event still more probable from the violent motions of the head." Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand holding on to the hard tackles, so that if the head should drop, he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the disgusting line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the inhumed harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out." In heaven's name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramming home a cartridge there?--Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head? Avast, will ye!"" Stand clear of the tackle!" cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket. Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the tremendous mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging--now over the sailors' heads, and now over the water--Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the nodding tackles, while hapless, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The side_by_side, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed first-come-first-serve was made to the side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship." Ha! ha!" cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright from the dispirited waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave." Both! both!--it is both!"--cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk. Now, how had this stately rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a big hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out miserable Tash by the head. He averred, that upon foremost thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion enceinte trouble;--he had thrust back the leg, and by a dextrous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the succeeding trial, he came forth in the good old way--head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected. And thus, through the courage and big skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most unbecoming and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the like course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing. I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be certain to seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or heard of some one's falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale's well. But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the light and most corked part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well--a double welded, hammered substance, as I have before said, much profound than the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the present instance materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery, so it was. Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the selfsame whitest and mincing of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled--the luscious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there? CHAPTER 79. The Prairie. To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as promising as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that renowned work of his, Lavater not only treats of the respective faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the modifications of expression observable therein. Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can. Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most blazing of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its total absence, as an outside appendage, must very largely affect the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your imposing conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mighty imperial beadle on his throne. In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the replete front of his head. This aspect is sublime. In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing enceinte cannon up mountain defiles, the elephant's brow is majestic. Human or sensual, the orphic brow is as that expectant golden seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees. It signifies--" God: done this day by my hand." But in most creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so gloomy, that the eyes themselves seem clear, unceasing, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer. But in the capital Sperm Whale, this in_high_spirits and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any early object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wonderful brow diminish; though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's mark of genius. But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his large genius is declared in his doing nothing finicky to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly little, as to be unequal_to of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetic nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistic sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's gamey seat, the corking Sperm Whale shall lord it. Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the round-eyed peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the abominable Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can. CHAPTER 80. The Nut. If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square. In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in length. Unhinge the low jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this fain plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the gamey end the skull forms a crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the tenacious floor of this crater--in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in depth--reposes the simple handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away behind its immense outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any early brain than that tangible semblance of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that mystical part of him as the seat of his intelligence. It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature's living intact state, is an intact delusion. As for his dependable brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world. If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its rearward end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say--This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with the approbatory fact of his stupendous bulk and power, you can in_force form to yourself the genuine, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the most grand potency is. But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain, you deem it incompetent of being adequately charted, then I have another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the rum external resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the beginning men to perceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an authoritative thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A sparse joist of a spine never yet upheld a wide and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world. Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a three-sided figure with the base downwards. As it passes through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of heavy capacity. Now, of course, this canal is filled with much the same strangely stringy substance--the spinal cord--as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be excessive to survey and map out the whale's spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the terrific comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord. But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the Sperm Whale's hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the big vertebrae, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it. From its relative situation then, I should call this eminent hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is unsubduable, you will yet have reason to know. CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin. The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of Bremen. At one time the great whaling people in the world, the Dutch and Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very encompassing intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in the Pacific. For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects. While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the bows instead of the stern." What has he in his hand there?" cried Starbuck, pointing to something wavingly held by the German. "out_of_the_question!--a lamp-feeder!"" Not that," said Stubb, "no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don't you see that big tin can there alongside of him?--that's his boiling water. Oh! he's all right, is the Yarman."" Go along with you," cried Flask, "it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He's out of oil, and has come a-begging." However odd it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare. As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his utter ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in profound darkness--his net drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically called a CLEAN one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin. His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders. Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's keels. There were eight whales, an medium pod. Aware of their danger, they were going all au_fait with bang-up speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a neat, wide-eyed wake, as though continually unrolling a bang-up wide parchment upon the sea. Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively wearisome progress, as well as by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed confutable; for it is not accustomed for such august leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his spacious muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was brusque, tiresome, and heavy; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his former inhumed extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble." Who's got some paregoric?" said Stubb, "he has the stomach-ache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the maiden foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he's lost his tiller." As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this erstwhile whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say." Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that wounded arm," cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him." Mind he don't sling thee with it," cried Starbuck. "Give way, or the German will have him." With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one fish, because not only was he the gravid, and therefore the most worthful whale, but he was near to them, and the other whales were going with such neat velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this juncture the Pequod's keels had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the large start he had had, Derick's boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his extraneous rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already so close to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite confident that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats." The discourteous and unthankful dog!" cried Starbuck; "he mocks and dares me with the identical poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!"--then in his old intense whisper--" Give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!"" I tell ye what it is, men"--cried Stubb to his crew--" it's against my religion to get frantic; but I'd like to eat that villainous Yarman--Pull--won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the good man. Come, why don't some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard--we don't budge an inch--we're becalmed. Halloo, here's grass growing in the boat's bottom--and by the Lord, the mast there's budding. This won't do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?"" Oh! see the suds he makes!" cried Flask, dancing up and down--" What a hump--Oh, DO pile on the beef--lays like a log! Oh! my lads, DO spring--slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads--baked clams and muffins--oh, DO, DO, spring,--he's a hundred barreller--don't lose him now--don't oh, DO N'T!--see that Yarman--Oh, won't ye pull for your duff, my lads--such a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men!--a bank!--a whole bank! The bank of England!--Oh, DO, DO, DO!--What's that Yarman about now?" At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the twofold view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time economically accelerating his ain by the fleeting impetus of the backward toss." The unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb. "Pull now, men, like fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d'ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces for the honour of old Gayhead? What d'ye say?"" I say, pull like god-dam,"--cried the Indian. Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod's three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed, momentarily neared him. In that fine, open, knightly attitude of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of, "There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with the Yarman! Sail over him!" But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was near to capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;--that was a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a deadly start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter. An instant more_than, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made. It was a terrific, most miserable, and maddening sight. The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with mournful cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this Brobdingnagian dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably miserable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stout man who so pitied. Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the final chance would for ever escape. But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang to their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapours of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the maiden fury of the whale's hasty rush, bumped the German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels." Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up presently--all right--I saw some sharks astern--St. Bernard's dogs, you know--relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah!--Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain--makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way; and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones--all a rushed down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!" But the monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the harpooneers that this speedy sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at last--owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the sorry--the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high-pitched in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude, dread of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this "holding on," as it is called; this hooking up by the knifelike barbs of his live flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the expert; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the enormous surface of him--in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet--the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground, in the air; how immense, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board. As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its unceasing juicy noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it believable that by three such thin threads the big Leviathan was suspended like the large weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--" Canst thou fill his skin with prickly irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears! In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and large-minded enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such vast phantoms flitting over his head!" Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetised wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in swell part from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a little icefield will, when a dense herd of livid bears are scared from it into the sea." Haul in! Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising." The lines, of which, hardly an inst before, not one hand's breadth could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship's lengths of the hunters. His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in sure directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by the sinful pressure of water at a capital distance below the surface, his life may be said to pour from him in unremitting streams. Yet so Brobdingnagian is the quantity of blood in him, and so removed and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of faraway and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from the Modern made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however speedy, sending its affrighted moisture into the air. From this final vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was untouched. As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the unharmed upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noble oaks when flat, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded unreasoning bulbs, horribly poor to see. But pity there was none. For all his onetime age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the sedate churches that preach categoric inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, miserable down on the flank." A squeamish spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."" Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!" But humane Starbuck was too late. At the inst of the dart an cankerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most wretched, that concluding expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground--so the last long dying spout of the whale. Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so that ere prospicient every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords. By very thoughtful management, when the ship drew near, the whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the crocked fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom. It so chanced that almost upon world-class cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the dispirited part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more funny was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the interred iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered. What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the lowest; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the body; then, when the command was given to break well-defined from it, such was the stabile strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the former side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the unmovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so depressed had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over." Hold on, hold on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body, "don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains."" Knife? Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's weighed_down hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at the large fluke-chains. But a few strokes, replete of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a wonderful snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank. Now, this episodic inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a very odd thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it. Usually the bushed Sperm Whale floats with with_child buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the sole whales that thus sank were honest-to-god, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumy; then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an rare specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For vernal whales, in the high health, and swelling with stately aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink. Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less unresistant to this accident than any former species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt due in no modest degree to the great quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or various days, the sunken whale again rises, more_than buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a surpassing magnitude; becomes a sort of fleshly balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again. It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the lone spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its unbelievable power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valorous chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four new keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold, bright chase. Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend. CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling. There are some enterprises in which a measured disorderliness is the straight method. The more_than I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its smashing honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many smashing demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or former have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity. The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the foremost whaleman; and to the unceasing honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any seedy intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the adorable Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the selfsame act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the just harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the superposable bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the like skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most queer and suggestively important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail. Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many sometime chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea," saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the bully monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale. Let not the New paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valorous whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the heavy ignorance of those times, when the truthful form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the fleshly ridden by St. George might have been only a great seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether discrepant with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no former than the with_child Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or shady part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our ain noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by skilful rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that ethical company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they. Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained doubtful: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer of rejoicing skillful deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan. But, by the good contradictory authorities, this Greek story of Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet? Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of one-time times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the initiatory of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of virtual hints to immature architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the utmost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman? Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that? CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded. Reference was made to the diachronic story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historic story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some skeptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that. One erstwhile Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:--He had one of those quaint outmoded Bibles, embellished with peculiar, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head--a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems sensible enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on 2d thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless. Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body and the whale's gastric juices. But this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a DEAD whale--even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has been divined by former Continental commentators, that when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called "The Whale," as some craft are nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle." Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver--an high-flown bag of wind--which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from the good point of the Mediterranean coast. How is that? But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through the unanimous length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the stark circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honour of the discovery of that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make forward-looking history a liar. But all these jerky arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his goosey pride of reason--a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in former Harris's Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honour of Jonah, in which Mosque was a marvellous lamp that burnt without any oil. CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling. To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are unfriendly; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, took more_than than customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event. Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium. Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or late inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What then remained? Of all the marvelous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small sword, or unspecific sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and feature is the marvellous distance to which the tenacious lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme headway. Steel and wood included, the full spear is some ten or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a loose material--pine. It is furnished with a belittled rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to the hand after darting. But before going further, it is of_import to mention here, that though the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful, on account of the not_bad weight and inferior length of the harpoon as compared with the lance, which in effect become severe drawbacks. As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling comes into play. Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humourous, calculated coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its length to see if it be exactly square, Stubb whistlingly gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its loose end in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before his waistband's middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood." That drove the spigot out of him!" cried Stubb. "'T is July's immortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were honest-to-goodness Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we'd drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that lively punch-bowl quaff the living stuff." Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dextrous dart is repeated, the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in adept leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die. CHAPTER 85. The Fountain. That for six thousand years--and no one knows how many millions of ages before--the bully whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been airless by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings--that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour--this is surely a notable thing. Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in worldwide breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked national structure which gives him even lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his average attitude, the Sperm Whale's mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head. If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function essential to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a sealed element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full hour and more_than (when at the bottom) without drawing a exclusive breath, or so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine he is supplied with a singular involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more_than, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four subsidiary stomachs. The anatomic fact of this labyrinth is sure; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and honest, seems the more weighty to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in HAVING HIS SPOUTINGS OUT, as the fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with all his former unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he rises again, he will be indisputable to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay out his total term below. Remark, however, that in different individuals these rates are unlike; but in any one they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere descending for practiced? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by hook or by final could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the expectant necessities that strike the victory to thee! In man, breathing is incessantly going on--one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time. It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all answers to his nose is that selfsame spout-hole; and being so clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout--whether it be water or whether it be vapour--no right-down certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea. Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, and as that long canal--like the grand Erie Canal--is furnished with a sort of locks (that exposed and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener! Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little to one side; this queer canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the simple vapour of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the expectant necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration. But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knotted of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely. The primal body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always, when you are cheeseparing enough to a whale to get a airless view of his spout, he is in a surpassing commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at such times you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapour; or how do you know that they are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale's head? For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a diminished basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain. Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over queer touching the precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into slight contact with the outer, vapoury shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still snug contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The heady thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the corking inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no mutual, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled Attic, of an August noon; this seems an extra argument for the above supposition. And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapour--as you will sometimes see it--glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye. CHAPTER 86. The Tail. Other poets have warbled the praises of the gentle eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail. Reckoning the bombastic sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root expands into two blanket, firm, monotonous palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across. The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:--upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and low layers, are long and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of honest-to-goodness papist walls, the middle layer will furnish a queer parallel to the slender course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those howling relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the large strength of the masonry. But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it. Nor does this--its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the monolithic chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so innocent as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the simple negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar pragmatic virtues of his teachings. Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no fairy's arm can transcend it. Five great motions are particular to it. First, when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes. First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by. Second: It is a little pregnant, that while one sperm whale only fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the whale boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a around_the_bend rib or a dotted plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most severe result. These submerged side blows are so often received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play. Some one strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped. Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the elephant's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of wholesale, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a sure soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with crushed salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart. Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle of unfrequented seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the earsplitting concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a outstanding gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapour from the spiracle at his early extremity, you would think that that was the smoke from the touch-hole. Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his integral flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime BREACH--somewhere else to be described--this peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps the wondrous sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the mammoth tail seems spasmodically snatching at the high-pitched heaven. So in dreams, have I seen gallant Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a expectant herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with indisposed flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence. The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two diametric organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively belong. For as the mighty elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan's tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. The most fearsome blow from the elephant's trunk were as the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale's lumbering flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the other hurled total boats with all their oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.* *Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and the elephant is nonsensical, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream. The more_than I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an across-the-board herd, so noteworthy, occasionally, are these mystical gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting early motions of the whale in his general body, broad of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face. CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada. The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In a uninterrupted line from that peninsula stretch the farseeing islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the prospicient unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the convenience of ships and whales; blazing among which are the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas. Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway in that Brobdingnagian rampart of islands, buttressed by that bluff green promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond to the primal gateway opening into some Brobdingnagian walled empire: and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a meaning provision of nature, that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance, however unavailing, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the pricy cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce their claim to more strong tribute. Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the depressed shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged. With a mediocre, unfermented wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep shoreward by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the nifty whaling season there. By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, premature to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it. But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a solid lake's contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years' water in her. Clear old prize Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had come; they would only answer--" Well, boys, here's the ark!" Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more_than and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide_of_the_mark awake. But though the light-green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with captivated nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a individual jet was descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of singular magnificence saluted us. But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in pocket-size uninvolved companies, as in late times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if legion nations of them had sworn sedate league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the well cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without being greeted by a unmarried spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands. Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a outstanding semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a uninterrupted chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of lily-white mist, continually rising and falling away to leeward. Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a mellow hill of the sea, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of blueish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height. As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that precarious passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one firm, but still crescentic centre. Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda, the huge host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the idolized white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly directing attention to something in our wake. Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear. It seemed formed of isolated white vapours, rising and falling something like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying, "Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the sails;--Malays, sir, and after us!" As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very tolerant of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit,--mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he glanced upon the gullible walls of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that like gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman unbelieving devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses;--when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able-bodied to drag the firm thing from its place. But thoughts like these tumultuous very few of the reckless crew; and when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at lowest shot by the graphic green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more_than to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed fantastic instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,--though as yet a mile in their rearward,--than they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity. Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase, when a worldwide pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that they were now at final under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus' elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions expanding in immense irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their unretentive thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was still more_than strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such extravagant dismay. But this periodic timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a lone horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they will, at the slight alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men. Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is to be observed that as a unanimous the herd neither advanced nor retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes' time, Queequeg's harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the more precarious vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the delirious shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a mad throb. As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a lily-white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the half-crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed. But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite wild, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business. "Out of the way, Commodore!" cried one, to a bully dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an crying threatened to swamp us. "Hard down with your tail, there!" cried a 2d to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with his ain fan-like extremity. All whaleboats carry certain peculiar contrivances, originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of adequate size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each other's grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of them. The maiden and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the tremendous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball. But upon flinging the tertiary, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an insistent tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for the time. It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from the circumference of commotion, the dreaded disorders seemed waning. So that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more_than still moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the outer homocentric circles, and saw consecutive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no potential chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by belittled tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host. Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of those circles, the integral area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three straight miles. At any rate--though indeed such a test at such a time might be misleading--spoutings might be discovered from our low-spirited boat that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the full extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so youthful, unsophisticated, and every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these littler whales--now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake--evinced a grand fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was inconceivable not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but direful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it. But far beneath this fantastic world upon the surface, another and still strange world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly guileless; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing deadly nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did the new of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these niggling infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day older, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little kittenish; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the parental reticule; where, tail to head, and all quick for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts." Line! line!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; "him fast! him fast!--Who line him! Who struck?--Two whale; one big, one little!"" What ails ye, man?" cried Starbuck." Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing down. As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this innate line, with the parental end loose, becomes entangled with the fibrous one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the elusive secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw vernal Leviathan amours in the deep.* *The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:--a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these valued parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and fertile; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute MORE HOMINUM. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these deep creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eonian mildness of joy. Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden excited spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the infuriated narcotized whales now and then blindly darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last-place met our eyes. It is sometimes the custom when firm to a whale more than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon line; and in the sinful agony of the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went. But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of the inconceivable accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the costless end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that hagridden to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades. This terrific object seemed to recall the unharmed herd from their stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more_than contracting orbits the whales in the more key circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the retentive calm was departing. A small advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the disruptive masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the intact host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern." Oars! Oars!" he intensely whispered, seizing the helm--" gripe your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off, you Queequeg--the whale there!--prick him!--hit him! Stand up--stand up, and stay so! Spring, men--pull, men; never mind their backs--scrape them!--scrape away!" The boat was now all but jammed between two huge black bulks, leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their prospicient lengths. But by do-or-die endeavor we at lowest shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many exchangeable hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fleeting whales, had his hat taken clear from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of liberal flukes closelipped by. Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved itself into what seemed a taxonomic movement; for having clumped together at net in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near. The result of this lowering was somewhat demonstrative of that perspicacious saying in the Fishery,--the more_than whales the less fish. Of all the narcotized whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some early craft than the Pequod. CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters. The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations. Now, though such expectant bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but new vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated. In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of good grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a opulent Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the big leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at wide growth, are not more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the hale they are hereditarily entitled to EMBONPOINT. It is very rum to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year. When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange mistrustful sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert unseasoned Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw confidentially tight to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away! high times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the most horrendous duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with their long low jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,--furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated mouths. But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the first rush of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to watch that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to unseasoned Lothario, like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines. Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too plush of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at least, with only the paternal help. For like sure early omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a not_bad traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardour of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in curt, as a worldwide lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent, penitent, admonitory stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an monitory, huffish old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each untried Leviathan from his amative errors. Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably satiric, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that celebrated Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils. The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all older Sperm Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale--as a solitary Leviathan is called--proves an ancient one. Like revered moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the in_effect of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets. The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously mentioned, offer a potent contrast to the harem schools. For while those distaff whales are characteristically unsure, the new males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most grievous to encounter; excepting those wonderful grey-haired, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will fight you like relentless fiends exasperated by a penal gout. The Forty-barrel-bull schools are large than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians, they are wide of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems. Another point of difference between the manlike and female schools is still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull--poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey. CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish. The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the net chapter but one, necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge. It frequently happens that when respective ships are cruising in company, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For example,--after a weary and precarious chase and capture of a whale, the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a 2d whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexing and violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases. Perhaps the lonesome formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their ain legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they. I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it. First: What is a Fast-Fish? alive or deadened a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,--a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to do. These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen themselves sometimes consist in heavy words and knockout knocks--the Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and honorable whalemen allowances are always made for queer cases, where it would be an usurious moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But others are by no means so scrupulous. Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a arduous chase of a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at net, through peril of their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the selfsame eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs' teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat. Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his position, by alluding to a late crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife's viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to recover possession of her. Erskine was on the early side; and he then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the expectant stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last-place abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in her. Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale and the lady were reciprocally demonstrative of each other. These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the identical learned Judge in set terms decided, to wit,--That as for the boat, he awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the net capture; and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish) acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs. A vernacular man looking at this decision of the selfsame learned Judge, might possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter, the two smashing principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on. Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the unhurt of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the voracious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yon undetected villain's marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the blasting discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the belly-up, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that catastrophic discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the light bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that spherical L100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's patrimonial towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is short Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the unanimous of the law? But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable. What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish stock by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too? CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails." De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam." BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3. Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honourary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no average remainder. Now as this law, under a limited form, is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in several respects a strange anomaly touching the world-wide law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a disjoined car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the maiden place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within the net two years. It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the Cinque Ports, had after a gruelling chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the majestic emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of them. Now when these hapless sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their rich fish high and dry, bright themselves a good L150 from the cherished oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and skilful ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale's head, he says--" Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden's." Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation--so truly English--knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the tough heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made sheer to speak," Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?"" The Duke."" But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?"" It is his."" We have been at smashing trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains but our blisters?"" It is his."" Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a livelihood?"" It is his."" I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this whale."" It is his."" Won't the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"" It is his." In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some especial lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather intemperate one, an honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take the case of those unfortunate mariners into entire consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published) that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would decline meddling with early people's business. Is this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars? It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen, "because of its superior excellence." And by the legal commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such matters. But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers! In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pinmoney, an previous King's Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone." Now this was written at a time when the opprobrious limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this like bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a deplorable mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegoric meaning may lurk here. There are two regal fish so styled by the English law writers--the whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's average revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law. CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud." In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry." SIR T. BROWNE, V.E. It was a week or two after the net whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapoury, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod's deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea." I will bet something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they would keel up before long." Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed Gallic colours from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; bad than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are unqualified to bury the departed. So unendurable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose. Coming still near with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale alongside; and this 2nd whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematic whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely belly-up of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general. The Pequod had now swept so close to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales." There's a pretty fellow, now," he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship's bows, "there's a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the narcotized whale there, I mean; aye, and is contented too with scraping the dry bones of that other wanted fish he has there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a present of a little oil for dear charity's sake. For what oil he'll get from that narcotised whale there, wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And as for the early whale, why, I'll agree to get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he'll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a well deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes, I'm for it;" and so saying he started for the quarter-deck. By this time the faint air had become a sodding calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat's crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful Gallic taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a Brobdingnagian drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the solid terminating in a symmetric folded bulb of a smart red colour. Upon her head boards, in turgid gilt letters, he read "Bouton de Rose,"--Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the wild-eyed name of this aromatic ship. Though Stubb did not understand the BOUTON part of the inscription, yet the word ROSE, and the bulb-shaped figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the unanimous to him." A wooden rose-bud, eh?" he cried with his hand to his nose, "that will do very well; but how like all creation it smells!" Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale; and so talk over it. Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled--" Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?"" Yes," rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the chief-mate." Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?"" WHAT whale?"" The WHITE Whale--a Sperm Whale--Moby Dick, have ye seen him?" Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale--no."" Very good, then; good bye now, and I'll call again in a minute." Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands into a trumpet and shouted--" No, Sir! No!" Upon which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the Frenchman. He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag." What's the matter with your nose, there?" said Stubb. "Broke it?"" I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all!" answered the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much. "But what are you holding YOURS for?"" Oh, nothing! It's a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain't it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?"" What in the devil's name do you want here?" roared the Guernseyman, flying into a sudden passion." Oh! keep cool--cool? yes, that's the word! why don't you pack those whales in ice while you're working at'em? But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in his unscathed carcase."" I know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe it; this is his maiden voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But come aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me; and so I'll get out of this dirty scrape."" Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow," rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasseled caps of red worsted, were getting the toilsome tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather deadening and talked very libertine, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost unforesightful off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories. Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the Captain's round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's round-house (CABINET he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times. Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had brought them all into so offensive and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the flimsy suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter's office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the interview. By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small and dark, but rather touchy looking man for a sea-captain, with enceinte whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a reddened cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them." What shall I say to him first?" said he." Why," said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, "you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me, though I don't pretend to be a judge."" He says, Monsieur," said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain, "that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought alongside." Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more." What now?" said the Guernsey-man to Stubb." Why, since he takes it so loose, tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he's a baboon."" He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dehydrated one, is far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we value our lives, to cut idle from these fish." Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship." What now?" said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them." Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that--that--in fact, tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody else."" He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any service to us." Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux." He wants you to take a glass of wine with him," said the interpreter." Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink with the man I've diddled. In fact, tell him I must go."" He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his drinking; but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had good drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for it's so calm they won't drift." By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernsey-man to this effect,--that having a retentive tow-line in his boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship's side. While the Frenchman's boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the early way, ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line. Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his needlelike boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up former Roman tiles and pottery buried in fertile English loam. His boat's crew were all in high-pitched excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters. And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look thwarted, especially as the horrifying nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without at all blending with it for a time." I have it, I have it," cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterraneous regions, "a purse! a purse!" Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled onetime cheese; very soapy and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, in_effect friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab's loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them proficient bye. CHAPTER 92. Ambergris. Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the Gallic compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is gentle, pliant, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it. Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the black bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in blasting rocks. I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, sure hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors' trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing more_than than pieces of pocket-size squid bones embalmed in that manner. Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the in_force musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst. I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the calumnious aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this execrable stigma originate? I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the initiatory arrival of the Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the brisk blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of prominent casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is given forth somewhat standardised to that arising from excavating an one-time city grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in-Hospital. I partly surmise also, that this disgustful charge against whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in late times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one victimized by the knowledgeable Fogo Von Slack, in his bang-up work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer, productive; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in wide-cut operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or beat, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is dead_on_target, seldom in the open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that far-famed elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Amerindic town to do honour to Alexander the Great? CHAPTER 93. The Castaway. It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most meaning event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an event most deplorable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly lively and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own. Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a cosmopolitan thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats' crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, unwieldy, or trepid wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the small negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly. In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a smuggled pony and a bloodless one, of adequate developments, though of unalike colour, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, amiable, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any early race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this piffling black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon sheeny ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's peaceful securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere farseeing will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at melodic even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most telling lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some affected gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divine symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story. It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place. The foremost time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the uttermost, for he might often find it needful. Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its wonted rap, which happened, in this instance, to be right under hapless Pip's seat. The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and neck. Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?" Meantime Pip's low, choked face plainly looked, Do, for God's sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a minute, this integral thing happened." Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved. So soon as he recovered himself, the poor small negro was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all the rest was indefinite, as the sound advice ever is. Now, in general, STICK TO THE BOAT, is your lawful motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM THE BOAT, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted scrupulous advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide-cut a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, "Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making carnal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence. But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very like circumstances to the maiden performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too rightful to his word. It was a beautiful, big, down day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb's unappeasable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, hapless Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the high-flown and the brightest. Now, in calm weather, to swim in the undefendable ocean is as light to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea--mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides. But had Stubb really abandoned the misfortunate petty negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their ain timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all like instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies. But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales airless to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's annulated horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the bare chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his peaceful eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the countless, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frenetic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself. CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand. That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case. While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the orotund tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this like sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon. It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A mellifluous and oily duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a preferent cosmetic. Such a clear! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a yummy molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise. As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a grim tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those easygoing, soft globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,--literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrifying oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the honest-to-god Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rarified virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever. Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, tender, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the svelte ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each early; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the selfsame milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many lengthened, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually depressed, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works. First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed tendons--a wad of muscle--but still contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is maiden cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble. Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, good-time, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and lucky ground, dotted with spots of the deep crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that special venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne. There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably seeping, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a lengthy squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing. Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dreary, sticky substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan. Nippers. Strictly this word is not endemic to the whale's vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is a myopic firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of sorcerous, allures along with it all impurities. But to learn all about these deep matters, your good way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a longsighted talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a slow lantern, a space has been left readable for the workmen. They generally go in pairs,--a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the like name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is shrewd as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his ain toes, or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men. CHAPTER 95. The Cassock. Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no little curiosity a very unknown, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the tremendous cistern in the whale's immense head; not the prodigy of his demented crushed jaw; not the miracle of his harmonious tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,--longer than a Kentuckian is magniloquent, near a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the fifteenth chapter of the First Book of Kings. Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bandy shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at final hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the former end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the entire canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office. That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a blazing pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer! * *Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to the mincer. It enjoins him to be deliberate, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality. CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works. Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works. She presents the peculiar anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It is as if from the heart-to-heart field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks. The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a funny strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight straight, and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a turgid, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the peachy try-pots, two in number, and each of respective barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the night-watches some misanthropical old sailors will crawl into them and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them--one man in each pot, side by side--many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound numerical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was maiden indirectly struck by the noteworthy fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloidal, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time. Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the full inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rearward, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as flying as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open lineal from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment. It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business." All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the foremost fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of warm ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its soapy properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a rife burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his ain fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his ain smoke! for his smoke is ugly to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, godforsaken, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit. By midnight the works were in replete operation. We were percipient from the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vindictive deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations. The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a all-embracing hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers. With vast forked poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snakelike flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the all-embracing wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the crimson heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbarian brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their diabolic adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their vast pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and ladened with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul. So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at terminal begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm. But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since incomprehensible) thing occurred to me. Starting from a abbreviated standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the gloomy hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the firm binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how thankful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee! Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the contrived fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the splendid, gilt, glad sun, the lone on-key lamp--all others but liars! Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dreary side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that deadly man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be reliable--not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The true of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, hapless devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably tremendous Solomon. But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain" (I.E., even while living) "in the congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, fifty it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the black gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still high than early birds upon the plain, even though they soar. CHAPTER 97. The Lamp. Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one unmarried moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the blue, and eat in the glum, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of unclouded, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship's black hull still houses an illumination. See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps--often but one-time bottles and vials, though--to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the pure of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It is honeyed as former grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be certain of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game. CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up. Already has it been related how the majuscule leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of former to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his bully padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in imputable time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;--but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing--singing, if I may--the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow. While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the tremendous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, EX OFFICIO, every sailor is a cooper. At length, when the concluding pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to their net rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up. In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most noteworthy incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck tremendous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the total ship seems keen leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening. But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously clean commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the gloomy rigging. All the legion implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The corking hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost the integral ship's company, the unhurt of this scrupulous duty is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their ain ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, reinvigorated and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the prissy Holland. Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins! But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more_than whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the honest-to-god oaken furniture, and drop at least one diminished grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the stern uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,--they only step to the deck to carry immense chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their identical sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the short fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of "There she blows!" and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the unanimous weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but worthful sperm; and then, with aweary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when--THERE SHE BLOWS!--the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's previous routine again. Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in burnished Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast concluding voyage--and, gooselike as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope! CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon. Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking veritable turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the exceptional object before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the like riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness. But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little deserving, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way. Now this doubloon was of sodding, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and speckless to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the aweary watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at final, and whether he would ever live to spend it. Now those baronial golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and deep banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic. It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most loaded example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the groovy equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the tertiary a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their common cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra. Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing." There's something ever swollen in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and high-flown things; look here,--three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the brave, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own secret self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a one-time equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes,'t is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then."" No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday," murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. "The old man seems to read Belshazzar's abominable writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the shiny sun meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the expectant sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet-scented solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."" There now's the erstwhile Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, "he's been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer's Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, undistinguished opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing marvellous? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here's signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what previous Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I'll get the almanac and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's arithmetical, I'll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book. Let's see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he's always among'em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are--here they go--all alive:--Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here's Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among'em. Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the threshold between two of dozen sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That's my diminished experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch's navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing terrific in signs, and meaning in wonders! There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram--lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins--that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path--he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rearward; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; entire tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his unscathed deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all awake and hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll have to say. There; he's before it; he'll out with something presently. So, so; he's beginning."" I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what's all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's on-key; and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won't smoke sordid pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy'em out."" Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a goosy look to it; yet, if it be really gooselike, then has it a sort of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the onetime hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of the mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he's back again; what does that mean? Hark! he's muttering--voice like an one-time worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!"" If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of these signs. I've studied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what's the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign--the roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee."" There's another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg--all tattooing--looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country. And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--I guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don't know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it for an one-time button off some king's trowsers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin--fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip--wretched boy! would he had died, or I; he's half frightful to me. He too has been watching all of these interpreters--myself included--and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!"" I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."" Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind, piteous fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!"" I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."" Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again."" I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."" Well, that's funny."" And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow, especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare-crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of honest-to-god trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an onetime jacket."" Wonder if he means me?--free!--inadequate lad!--I could go hang myself. Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity. I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too crazy-witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering."" Here's the ship's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what's the consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught's nailed to the mast it's a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White Whale; he'll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in sometime Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown over in it; some sometime darkey's wedding ring. How did it get there? And so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with stratified oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the wanted, valued, gold! the immature miser'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes'mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!" CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm. The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London." Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?" So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his ain boat's bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, well-favored man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a wide roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar's surcoat." Hast seen the White Whale!"" See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up a clean arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet." Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him--" Stand by to downcast!" In less than a minute, without quitting his small craft, he and his crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his ain, and then it was always by an clever and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very leisurely matter for anybody--except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen--to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for the groovy swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain. It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every niggling untoward circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at beginning they did not seem to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, "I see, I see!--avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle." As ripe luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two former, and the gravid tackles were still aloft, and the monumental curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his lonely thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the word, held himself fast, and at the like time also helped to hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the eminent bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, "Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!--an arm and a leg!--an arm that never can shrink, d'ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did'st thou see the White Whale?--how long ago?"" The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope; "there I saw him, on the Line, last season."" And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so." Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"" Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"" It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line," began the Englishman. "I was nescient of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles."" It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath." And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin."" Aye, aye--they were mine--MY irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--" but on!"" Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly. "Well, this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!" Aye, I see!--wanted to part it; costless the fast-fish--an onetime trick--I know him."" How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander, "I do not know; but in biting the line, it got cruddy of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn't know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the early whale's; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was--the noble and boastful I ever saw, sir, in my life--I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my inaugural mate's boat--Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way, Captain--Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain);--as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the 1st harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir--hearts and souls live, man--the following instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both eyes out--all befogged and bedeadened with black foam--the whale's tail looming straight up out of it, vertical in the air, like a marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the 2d iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the lily-white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips. We all struck out. To escape his atrocious flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one undecomposed dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here" (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); "yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell's flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh--clean along the whole length of my arm--came out near my wrist, and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain--Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon: Bunger, my lad,--the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn." The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled captains. But, at his superior's introduction of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain's bidding." It was a shocking regretful wound," began the whale-surgeon; "and, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy--"" Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; "go on, boy."" Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot weather there on the Line. But it was no use--I did all I could; sat up with him nights; was very serious with him in the matter of diet--"" Oh, very life-threatening!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his voice, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn't see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o'clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very serious in my diet. Oh! a dandy watcher, and very dietetically grievous, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don't ye? You know you're a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept animated by any other man."" My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--said the unflappable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab--" is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But I may as well say--en passant, as the French remark--that I myself--that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy--am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink--"" Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on--go on with the arm story."" Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly. "I was about observing, sir, before Captain Boomer's bantering interruption, that spite of my undecomposed and grievous endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all rule"--pointing at it with the marlingspike--" that is the captain's work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one's brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into mephistophelean passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir"--removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the little scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a wound--" Well, the captain there will tell you how that came here; he knows."" No, I don't," said the captain, "but his mother did; he was born with it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you--you Bunger! was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal."" What became of the White Whale?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had been impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen." Oh!" cried the one-armed captain, "oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick--as some call him--and then I knew it was he."" Did'st thou cross his wake again?"" Twice."" But could not fasten?"" Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows."" Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen"--very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession--" Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man's arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in upright earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in modest tacks, d'ye see. No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporated it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are warm adequate about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that's all."" No, thank ye, Bunger," said the English Captain, "he's welcome to the arm he has, since I can't help it, and didn't know him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be keen glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of valued sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's effective let alone; don't you think so, Captain?"--glancing at the ivory leg." He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is estimable let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He's all a magnet! How foresighted since thou saw'st him concluding? Which way heading?"" Bless my soul, and curse the unsporting fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; "this man's blood--bring the thermometer!--it's at the boiling point!--his pulse makes these planks beat!--sir!"--taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm." Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks--" Man the boat! Which way heading?"" Good God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put." What's the matter? He was heading east, I think.--Is your Captain crazy?" whispering Fedallah. But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower. In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his ain, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod. CHAPTER 101. The Decanter. Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the far-famed whaling house of Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not far behind the united purple houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my legion fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the maiden English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years premature (ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in big fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the corking Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the unharmed globe who so harpooned him. In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the only charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the nations to humble a whale-boat of any sort in the slap-up South Sea. The voyage was a expert and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not contented with this dependable deed, the indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons--how many, their mother only knows--and under their quick auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship--well called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the smashing Nipponese Whaling Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer. All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for the majuscule South Sea of the other world. The ship named after him was desirable of the honour, being a very immobile sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps--every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam I had--farsighted, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his ivory heel--it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it's squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands--visitors and all--were called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each former aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my taste. The beef was fine--sturdy, but with body in it. They said it was bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; little, but satisfying, symmetrically spheric, and durable dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread--but that couldn't be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in unforesightful, the bread contained the sole unfermented fare they had. But the forecastle was not very tripping, and it was very well-heeled to step over into a drear corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook's boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band. But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English whalers I know of--not all though--were such noted, hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of diachronic whale research, when it has seemed needed. The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat former fashions, touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a worldwide thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling skilful cheer is not normal and natural, but resultant and finicky; and, therefore, must have some particular origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated. During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I concluded that this must be the priceless memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one" Fitz Swackhammer." But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble--this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper," but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was, headed, "Smeer," or "fat," that I found a prospicient detailed list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following: 400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of easygoing bread. 2,800 firkins of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of beer. Most statistical tables are parchingly juiceless in the reading; not so in the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with unanimous pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and unspoilt cheer. At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, adequate_to of a nonnatural and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more buttery by the nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those glacial Polar Seas, on the identical coasts of that Esquimaux country where the good-time natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil. The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those frigid fisheries could only be prosecuted in the scant summer of that climate, so that the unhurt cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the inadequate voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks' allowance, single of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat's head, and take honest aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and bibulous in his boat; and grave loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford. But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of two or three centuries ago were in_high_spirits livers; and that the English whalers have not neglected so splendid an example. For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing well out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the decanter. CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides. Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few internal structural features. But to a enceinte and thorough wholesale comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still farther, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditioned skeleton. But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a simple oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels. I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that untested cub? And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their mammoth, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far remote from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital. Among many early fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbarian vertu, had brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of rattling devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, redolent canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores. Chief among these latter was a expectant Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. When the huge body had at utmost been stripped of its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it. The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystical head again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the fantastic lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles. It was a grand sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood mellow and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their ladened branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the majuscule sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unweary verdure. Oh, fussy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!--whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!--but one single word with thee! Nay--the shuttle flies--the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be advertent; for so, in all this din of the peachy world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar. Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great, blanched, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a mammoth idler! Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with young Life, and begat him curly-headed glories. Now, when with majestic Tranquo I visited this grand whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the material jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton--brushed the vines aside--broke through the ribs--and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones. Cutting me a unripe measuring-rod, I once more_than dived within the skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the altitude of the net rib, "How now!" they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure this our god! That's for us." "Aye, priests--well, how farsighted do ye make him, then?" But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked each other's sconces with their yard-sticks--the groovy skull echoed--and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own admeasurements. These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But inaugural, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not barren to utter any fictitious measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States." Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the grownup magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's. In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon standardised grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a dandy chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities--spread out his ribs like a mammoth fan--and swing all day upon his low jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead. The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied direct from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no early secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the former parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale. CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton. In the foremost place, I wish to lay before you a special, plain statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove utile here. According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the great sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my deliberate calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the bombastic magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants. Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's imagination? Having already in respective ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers former parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very expectant a proportion of the intact extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a over notion of the ecumenical structure we are about to view. In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two Feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one 5th in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a 3rd of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals. To me this Brobdingnagian ivory-ribbed chest, with the farseeing, unrelieved spine, extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a bang-up ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a farsighted, disconnected timber. The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six feet long; the 2nd, 3rd, and quaternary were each successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay footpath bridges over lowly streams. In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The large of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is peachy in depth. Now, the large depth of the invested body of this special whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the unfeigned notion of the living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the plentiful fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and royal, but boneless flukes, an utter blank! How vain and goosey, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wonderful whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. But the spine. For that, the good way we can consider it is, with a crane, to pile its bones mellow up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar. There are 40 and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not locked together. They mostly lie like the neat knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of threatening masonry. The gravid, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The small, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still minor ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the huge of living things tapers off at last into childlike child's play. CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale. From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in royal folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the mammoth involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like smashing cables and hawsers coiled away in the ulterior orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship. Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently thoroughgoing in the enterprise; not overlooking the minute originative germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomic peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archeological, fossiliferous, and antiquated point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the grievous words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a Brobdingnagian quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that illustrious lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me. One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their dependent, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the simple act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the hale universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my multifarious time I have been a stone-mason, and also a nifty digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the other geologic strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently akin to them in ecumenical respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils. Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at versatile intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more rummy of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a forgetful street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the gravid docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species. But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost sodding vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a vast reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this so-called reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A meaning illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most sinful creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence. When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the like time bearing on the other hand alike affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that fantastic period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when impacted bastions of ice pressed tough upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the unanimous world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed old blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the painful terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over. But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the patent print of his fin. In an apartment of the majuscule temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, previous Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled. Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the venerable John Leo, the former Barbary traveller." Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a grievous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon'em. They keep a Whale's Rib of an unbelievable length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple." In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there. CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?--Will He Perish? Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk of his sires. But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found in the Tertiary system (embracing a clear-cut geological period prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its early ones. Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the large is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a big sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture. But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated? Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet. And Lacepede, the Gallic naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in the identical beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and 28 feet. And this work was published so later as A.D. 1825. But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so. Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the old Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the productive of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have degenerated. But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more deep Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring's straits, and into the outside secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all Continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the terminal man, smoke his last-place pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff. Comparing the gibbous herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not xl years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the civilised broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem equipped, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction. But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so unforesightful a period ago--not a unspoilt lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this tremendous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for xlviii months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the former Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated. Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in quondam years (the latter part of the last-place century, say) these Leviathans, in little pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more_than remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a big degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into huge but widely separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the alleged whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in late years abounding with them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle. Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man. But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this plus havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions. But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000, have been annually slain on the nor'-west coast by the Americans alone; yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance of fiddling or no account as an opposing argument in this matter. Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of the more tremendous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are legion as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the sequential monarchs of the East--if they still survive there in corking numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined. Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more_than, therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of creation yielding up the hot bodies of all the men, women, and children who were alive 75 years ago; and adding this countless host to the present human population of the globe. Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah's flood he despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the unceasing whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies. CHAPTER 106. Ahab's Leg. The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some little violence to his ain person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his ain pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an extra twist and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy. And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, brainsick recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that numb bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and undetectable; by some unknown, and seemingly incomprehensible, out_of_the_question casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured. Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sugared songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all scurvy events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from sure canonic teachings, that while some instinctive enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the high earthly felicities ever have a sure unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystical significance, and, in some men, an archangelical grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at lowest among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers. Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many early particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg's bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least. That dreadful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty--remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab--invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's decks. But be all this as it may; let the unobserved, equivocal synod in the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain hard-nosed procedures;--he called the carpenter. And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of the stout, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to provide all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed. CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter. Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the like point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both modern-day and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage. Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a sealed off-handed, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings validating to his own; the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those legion handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an supplementary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly effective in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in barbarian and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:--repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other sundry matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both utile and capricious. The one grand stage where he enacted all his assorted parts so manifold, was his vice-bench; a prospicient rude ponderous table furnished with several vices, of dissimilar sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works. A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a engrossed: out of unclouded shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his heavy vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the wretched fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth. Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so wide-cut a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain neutral stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernable in the hale visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;--yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a sure grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever minuscule outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, ad-lib actual process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, MULTUM IN PARVO, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior--though a little swelled--of a vernacular pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was libertine: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were. Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a vulgar soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unexplainable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a with_child part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake. CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter. The Deck--First Night Watch. (CARPENTER STANDING BEFORE HIS VICE-BENCH, AND BY THE LIGHT OF TWO LANTERNS BUSILY FILING THE IVORY JOIST FOR THE LEG, WHICH JOIST IS FIRMLY FIXED IN THE VICE. SLABS OF IVORY, LEATHER STRAPS, PADS, SCREWS, AND VARIOUS TOOLS OF ALL SORTS LYING ABOUT THE BENCH. FORWARD, THE RED FLAME OF THE FORGE IS SEEN, WHERE THE BLACKSMITH IS AT WORK.) Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is intemperate which should be diffuse, and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and shinbones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works better (SNEEZES). Halloa, this bone dust is (SNEEZES)--why it's (SNEEZES)--yes it's (SNEEZES)--bless my soul, it won't let me speak! This is what an honest-to-goodness fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and you don't get this dust; amputate a springy bone, and you don't get it (SNEEZES). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have that ferule and buckle-screw; I'll be ready for them presently. Lucky now (SNEEZES) there's no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a bare shinbone--why it's easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn him out as peachy a leg now as ever (SNEEZES) scraped to a lady in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in shop windows wouldn't compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (SNEEZES) with washes and lotions, just like resilient legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must call his former Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right; too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that's the heel; we are in luck; here he comes, or it's somebody else, that's certain. AHAB (ADVANCING) (DURING THE ENSUING SCENE, THE CARPENTER CONTINUES SNEEZING AT TIMES) Well, manmaker! Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let me measure, sir. Measured for a leg! good. Well, it's not the first time. About it! There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some. Oh, sir, it will break bones--beware, beware! No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. What's Prometheus about there?--the blacksmith, I mean--what's he about? He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now. Right. It's a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce red flame there! Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work. Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most significant thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable. How the soot flies! This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter, when he's through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack. Sir? Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a thoroughgoing man after a desirable pattern. Imprimis, l feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to'em, to stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see--shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away. Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he speaking to, I should like to know? Shall I keep standing here? (ASIDE).'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a unreasoning dome; here's one. No, no, no; I must have a lantern. Ho, ho! That's it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn. What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man? Thrusted light is bad than presented pistols. I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter. Carpenter? why that's--but no;--a very respectable, and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, carpenter;--or would'st thou rather work in clay? Sir?--Clay? clay, sir? That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir. The fellow's undutiful! What art thou sneezing about? Bone is rather dusty, sir. Take the hint, then; and when thou art deadened, never bury thyself under living people's noses. Sir?--oh! ah!--I guess so;--yes--costly! Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right undecomposed workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same selfsame place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that honest-to-goodness Adam away? Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something peculiar on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his former spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir? It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle? I should humbly call it a poser, sir. Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah! Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir. Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.--How long before the leg is done? Perhaps an hour, sir. Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (TURNS TO GO). Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be detached as air; and I'm down in the unhurt world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthy Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, succinct vertebra. So. CARPENTER (RESUMING HIS WORK). Well, well, well! Stubb knows him good of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer--queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time--queer--sir--queer, queer, very queer. And here's his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow! has a stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he'll stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all three places standing in one hell--how was that? Oh! I don't wonder he looked so contemptuous at me! I'm a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a shortsighted, little Old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with grandiloquent, heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty spry, and there's a dandy cry for life-boats. And here's the heron's leg! recollective and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted previous lady uses her pudgy honest-to-god coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he's a heavy driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the early for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and let's finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old beer barrels, to fill'em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a literal live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he'll be standing on this to-morrow; he'll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the footling oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now! CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin. According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have sprung a big leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.* *In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by the ship's pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply close; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any severe leakage in the valued cargo. Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing close to Formosa and the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another freestanding one representing the farseeing eastern coasts of the Japanese islands--Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a tenacious pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the rattling old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again." Who's there?" hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to it. "On deck! Begone!"" Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We must up Burtons and break out."" Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?"" Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir."" So it is, so it is; if we get it."" I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir."" And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak! I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of blabbermouthed casks, but those tattling casks are in a tattling ship; and that's a far worse plight than the Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not have the Burtons hoisted."" What will the owners say, sir?"" Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the lonesome real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship's keel.--On deck!"" Captain Ahab," said the reddening mate, moving farther into the cabin, with a daring so strangely venerating and cautious that it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slender outward manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself;" A honorable man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab."" Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?--On deck!"" Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir--to be forbearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?" Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.--On deck!" For an insistent in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instantaneous and said: "Thou hast incensed, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man."" He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!" murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. "What's that he said--Ahab beware of Ahab--there's something there!" Then unconsciously using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the small cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck." Thou art but too beneficial a fellow, Starbuck," he said lowly to the mate; then raising his voice to the crew: "Furl the t'gallant-sails, and close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton, and break out in the main-hold." It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade the fragile symptom of open disaffection, however transeunt, in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted. CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin. Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it being calm weather, they broke out rich and deep, worrying the slumbers of the Brobdingnagian ground-tier butts; and from that dark midnight sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they go; and so ancient, and corroded, and boney the aspect of the lowermost puncheons, that you almost looked adjacent for some mouldy corner-stone cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards, vainly warning the potty old world from the flood. Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an air-freighted demijohn. top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them then. Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to his endless end. Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown; dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but--as we have elsewhere seen--mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that subterranean confinement, resolutely manhandle the ungainly casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the holders, so called. Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a unripened spotted lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, piteous pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he caught a fearful chill which lapsed into a fever; and at concluding, after some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew acute, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a rattling testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly grand and timorous in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a final revelation, which only an author from the idle could adequately tell. So that--let us say it again--no dying Chaldee or Greek had high-pitched and holy thoughts than those, whose secret shades you saw creeping over the face of miserable Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his last rest, and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted him high and in_high_spirits towards his destined heaven. Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a funny favour he asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain short canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike the custom of his ain race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the low heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milklike way. He added, that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the common sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages. Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was at once commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might include. There was some ethnic, coffin-coloured Old lumber aboard, which, upon a long premature voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these drab planks the coffin was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took Queequeg's measure with capital accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg's person as he shifted the rule." Ah! inadequate fellow! he'll have to die now," ejaculated the Long Island sailor. Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and universal reference, now transferringly measured on it the accurate length the coffin was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to work. When the final nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether they were ready for it yet in that direction. Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one's consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the miserable fellows ought to be indulged. Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an paying_attention eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of sassy water was placed at the head, and a modest bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his terminal bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his fiddling god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with small but his composed countenance in view. "Rarmai" (it will do; it is soft), he murmured at final, and signed to be replaced in his hammock. But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this while, drew close to him where he lay, and with cushy sobbings, took him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine." Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this aweary roving? where go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those unfermented Antilles where the beaches are only dead with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who's now been missing long: I think he's in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very pitiful; for look! he's left his tambourine behind;--I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I'll beat ye your dying march."" I have heard," murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some elevated scholars. So, to my fond faith, short Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our celestial homes. Where learned he that, but there?--Hark! he speaks again: but more wildly now."" Form two and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon? Lay it across here.--Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!--mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!--take ye undecomposed heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a'shiver;--out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat! I'd never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all cowards--shame upon them! Let'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!" During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock. But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that his coffin was proved a near fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no need of the carpenter's box: and thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of his sudden convalescence was this;--at a vital moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, unruly, unintelligent destroyer of that sort. Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. So, in dependable time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight. With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphical marks, had written out on his body a perfect theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his ain proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wonderful work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that violent exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying misfortunate Queequeg--" Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!" CHAPTER 111. The Pacific. When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at terminal upon the bang-up South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue. There is, one knows not what gratifying mystery about this sea, whose gently unspeakable stirrings seem to speak of some concealed soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the interred Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness. To any contemplative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the late race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, eternal, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this cryptic, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those unceasing swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan. But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the Old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, "Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!" CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith. Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly alive pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do some petty job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their assorted weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled. Nevertheless, this previous man's was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent, sluggish, and sedate; bowing over still farther his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the operose beating of his hammer the sullen beating of his heart. And so it was.--Most execrable! A peculiar walk in this old man, a sure slight but painful appearing yawing in his gait, had at an other period of the voyage excited the curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful story of his unworthy fate. Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one farsighted, and as yet uncatastrophied 5th act of the grief of his life's drama. He was an erstwhile man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a young, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and farther out_of_sight in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his glad home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that disastrous cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always had the untried and loving sizable wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's infants were rocked to slumber. Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou taken this quondam blacksmith to thyself ere his entire ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delightful grief, and her orphans a truly august, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virginal elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some former family, and left the worse than useless older man standing, till the repulsive rot of life should make him well-heeled to harvest. Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more_than and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the final; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the foresighted church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless quondam man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls! Death seems the sole suitable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the initiatory salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of out_of_the_question, taking terrors, and wondrous, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of myriad Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them--" Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more unmindful than death. Come hither! put up THY gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!" Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling. CHAPTER 113. The Forge. With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs, when Captain Ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last-place, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the anvil--the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights, some of which flew close to Ahab." Are these thy Mother Carey's chickens, Perth? they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;--look here, they burn; but thou--thou liv'st among them without a scorch."" Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab," answered Perth, resting for a moment on his hammer; "I am retiring scorching; not easily can'st thou scorch a scar."" Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am raring of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go disturbed, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?--What wert thou making there?"" Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it."" And can'st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such voiceless usage as it had?"" I think so, sir."" And I suppose thou can'st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind how backbreaking the metal, blacksmith?"" Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one."" Look ye here, then," cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with both hands on Perth's shoulders; "look ye here--HERE--can ye smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith," sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow; "if thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer! Can'st thou smoothe this seam?"" Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?"" Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for though thou only see'st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone of my skull--THAT is all wrinkles! But, away with child's play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!" jingling the leathern bag, as if it were replete of gold coins. "I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There's the stuff," flinging the pouch upon the anvil. "Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses."" Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the ripe and obstinate stuff we blacksmiths ever work."" I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I'll blow the fire." When at final the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by spiralling them, with his own hand, round a tenacious, profound iron bolt. "A flaw!" rejecting the lowest one. "Work that over again, Perth." This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his ain iron. As, then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to him the glowing rods, one after the early, and the laborious pressed forge shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside." What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?" muttered Stubb, looking on from the forecastle. "That Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powder-pan." At net the shank, in one pure rod, received its last heat; and as Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab's bent face." Would'st thou brand me, Perth?" wincing for a moment with the pain;" have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?"" Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for the White Whale?"" For the snowy fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them thyself, man. Here are my razors--the dependable of steel; here, and make the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea." For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain not use them." Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup, nor pray till--but here--to work!" Fashioned at final into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near." No, no--no water for that; I want it of the on-key death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?" holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale's barbs were then tempered." Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood. Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a outstanding tension. Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, "Good! and now for the seizings." At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was then driven hard up into the socket; from the low end the rope was traced half-way along the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope--like the Three Fates--remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin, light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most pitiful sound was heard. Oh, Pip! thy ugly laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it! CHAPTER 114. The Gilder. Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but lowly success for their pains. At such times, under an abated sun; undirected all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, surefooted, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through in_high_spirits rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure. The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most occult mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole. Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as irregular an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his ain secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing. Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever youthful endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,--in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the coarse doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the last harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the aweary will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. And that like day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:--" Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his youthful bride's eye!--Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe." And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden light:--" I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!" CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor. And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded. It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her final cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home. The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the utmost whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same cherished fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp. As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising success; all the more rattling, for that while cruising in the like seas legion other vessels had gone total months without securing a single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room for the far more_than valuable sperm, but additional subsidiary casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along the deck, and in the captain's and officers' state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the large-minded head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his large boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction. As this glad ship of in_effect luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbaric sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still near, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her immense try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like POKE or stomach skin of the disgraceful fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the screaming jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastille, such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled into the sea. Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship's elevated quarter-deck, so that the unscathed rejoicing drama was wide before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual diversion. And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and fateful, with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other's wakes--one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to come--their two captains in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene." Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting a glass and a bottle in the air." Hast seen the White Whale?" gritted Ahab in reply." No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all," said the other good-humoredly. "Come aboard!"" Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?"" Not enough to speak of--two islanders, that's all;--but come aboard, quondam hearty, come along. I'll soon take that fatal from your brow. Come along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and homeward-bound."" How terrific familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Thou art a broad ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!" And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of the Pequod looking with grievous, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homewardbound craft, he took from his pocket a small-scale vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two removed associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings. CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale. Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's favourites sail confining by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed it with the Pequod. For succeeding day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab. It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns. Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle evident in all sperm whales dying--the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring--that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before." He turns and turns him to it,--how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, noble vassal of the sun!--Oh that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most frank and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Taiwanese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way." Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy freestanding throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me." Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, gamy aspiring, rainbowed jet!--that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now." Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose everlasting tossings the wild fowl finds his solitary rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!" CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch. The four whales slain that evening had died panoptic apart; one, far to windward; one, less remote, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab's. The waif-pole was thrust upright into the all_in whale's spout-hole; and the lantern hanging from its top, cast a turbulent flickering glare upon the black, lustrous back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which gently chafed the whale's blanket flank, like flabby surf upon a beach. Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air. Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the final men in a flooded world. "I have dreamed it again," said he." Of the hearses? Have I not said, former man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine?"" And who are hearsed that die on the sea?"" But I said, former man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the beginning not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the final one must be grown in America."" Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:--a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! such a sight we shall not soon see."" Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, honest-to-god man."" And what was that saying about thyself?"" Though it come to the last-place, I shall still go before thee thy pilot."" And when thou art so gone before--if that ever befall--then ere I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?--Was it not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."" Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom--" Hemp only can kill thee."" The gallows, ye mean.--I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;--" Immortal on land and on sea!" Both were dumb again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead whale was brought to the ship. CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant. The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab, coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship's prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon gamey noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about taking his customary daily observation of the sun to determine his latitude. Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's incomputable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne. Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his sitting form to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness. At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to himself: "Thou sea-mark! thou gamey and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I AM--but canst thou cast the least hint where I SHALL be? Or canst thou tell where some early thing besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!" Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:" Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the wretched, piteous point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these erstwhile eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; THESE shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou negligible thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!" As the mad former man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and bushed feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalist despair that seemed meant for himself--these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out--" To the braces! Up helm!--hearty in!" In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon her heel, her three firm-seated elegant masts erectly poised upon her longsighted, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient steed. Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's troubled way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck." I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at final, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one short heap of ashes!"" Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck--sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter,'Here some one thrusts these cards into these erstwhile hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!" CHAPTER 119. The Candles. Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most beaming but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Nipponese seas the mariner encounters the dire of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a stupefied and sleepy town. Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts fluttering here and there with the rags which the inaugural fury of the tempest had left for its after sport. Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what extra disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were directing the men in the gamey hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape. A bully rolling sea, dashing gamey up against the reeling ship's high-pitched teetering side, stove in the boat's bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a sieve." Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck," but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a majuscule recollective start before it leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind; it's all in fun: so the onetime song says;"--(SINGS.) Oh! jolly is the gale, And a joker is the whale, A' flourishin' his tail,--such a rummy, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! The scud all a flyin', That's his flip only foamin'; When he stirs in the spicin',--such a curious, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! Thunder splits the ships, But he only smacks his lips, A tastin' of this flip,--such a laughable, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!" Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace."" But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up."" Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."" What! how can you see good of a glum night than anybody else, never mind how goosey?"" Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand--his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou must!" I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"" Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the short way to Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a honest wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning." At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the like instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead." Who's there?"" Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire. Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel's way in the water; because of all this, the low parts of a ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made in foresighted slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require." The rods! the rods!" cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. "Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and aft. Quick!"" Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker side. Yet I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir."" Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!" All the yard-arms were tipped with a pale fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering snowy flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar." Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing sea heaved up under his ain small craft, so that its gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. "Blast it!"--but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried--" The corpusants have mercy on us all!" To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God's burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His "Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin" has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage. While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the mammoth jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the ignominious cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the nonnatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body. The tableau all waned at terminal with the pallidness aloft; and once more the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was Stubb. "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same in the song."" No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on retentive faces?--have they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck--but it's too drab to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with sperm-oil, five_hundred'ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti candles--that's the good promise we saw." At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and once more the gamey tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor." The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again. At the base of the mainmast, total beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung nodding, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In versatile enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast." Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So." Then turning--the utmost link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed up eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames." Oh! thou clear spirit of unmortgaged fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be genial; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at in_effect; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere celestial power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee." [ SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE NINE FLAMES LEAP LENGTHWISE TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS HEIGHT; AHAB, WITH THE REST, CLOSES HIS EYES, HIS RIGHT HAND PRESSED HARD UPON THEM. ]" I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these short eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of unaccented, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; unfastened eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"" The boat! the boat!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy boat, former man!" Ahab's harpoon, the one bad at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed in its blatant crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat's bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm--" God, God is against thee, Old man; forbear!'t is an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a clean wind of it homewards, to go on a practiced voyage than this." Overhearing Starbuck, the frightened crew instantly ran to the braces--though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the appalled mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast liberal a rope's end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:--" All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame. As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more dangerous, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay. CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch. AHAB STANDING BY THE HELM. STARBUCK APPROACHING HIM." We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?"" Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up now."" Sir!--in God's name!--sir?"" Well."" The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?"" Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises, but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.--By masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were made for gaga winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e'en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!" CHAPTER 121. Midnight.--The Forecastle Bulwarks. STUBB AND FLASK MOUNTED ON THEM, AND PASSING ADDITIONAL LASHINGS OVER THE ANCHORS THERE HANGING." No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how tenacious ago is it since you said the identical contrary? Didn't you once say that whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn't you say so?"" Well, suppose I did? What then? I've part changed my flesh since that time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we ARE loaded with powder barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my footling man, you have pretty red hair, but you couldn't get afire now. Shake yourself; you're Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat collar. Don't you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine Insurance companies have supererogatory guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But hark, again, and I'll answer ye the early thing. First take your leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope; now listen. What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn't got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don't you see, you timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is initiative struck? What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,--aye, man, and all of us,--were in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer's skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's well-heeled to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible."" I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard."" Yes, when a fellow's pissed through, it's hard to be sensible, that's a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what bad generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though. There, hammer that knot down, and we've done. So; next to touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d'ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more_than monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a nasty night, lad." CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.--Thunder and Lightning. THE MAIN-TOP-SAIL YARD.--TASHTEGO PASSING NEW LASHINGS AROUND IT." Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!" CHAPTER 123. The Musket. During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's jaw-bone tiller had various times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached to it--for they were slack--because some play to the tiller was indispensable. In a spartan gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion. Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the arduous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--one occupied forward and the former aft--the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that tempest-swept bird is on the wing. The three corresponding New sails were now bent and reefed, and a storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the water with some precision again; and the course--for the present, East-south-east--which he was to steer, if workable, was once more given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the ship as near her course as potential, watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a beneficial sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the nasty breeze became fair! Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "HO! THE FAIR WIND! OH-YE-HO, CHEERLY MEN!" the crew singing for joy, that so promising an event should so soon have falsified the malefic portents preceding it. In compliance with the standing order of his commander--to report immediately, and at any one of the 24 hours, any decided change in the affairs of the deck,--Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze--however reluctantly and gloomily,--than he mechanically went below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance. Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door,--a sparse one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that crying when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an malefic thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself." He would have chatoyant me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very musket that he pointed at me;--that one with the studded stock; let me touch it--lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;--that's not good. Best spill it?--wait. I'll cure myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly while I think.--I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom,--THAT'S bonny for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only clean for that accursed fish.--The very tube he pointed at me!--the identical one; THIS one--I hold it here; he would have killed me with the identical thing I handle now.--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere bushed reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed former man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him?--Yes, it would make him the self-willed murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this inst--put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,--in there, he's sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alert, and soon awake again. I can't withstand thee, then, previous man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own level commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd thy vow; say'st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!--But is there no other way? no legitimate way?--Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man's living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more outrageous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, immeasurable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law.--Aye, aye,'t is so.--Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a manque murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?--And would I be a murderer, then, if"--and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket's end against the door." On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.--Oh Mary! Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death, onetime man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?--The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and master topsails are reefed and set; she heads her course."" Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at terminal!" Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the sure-enough man's tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream to speak. The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel; Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place." He's too reasoned asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know'st what to say." CHAPTER 124. The Needle. Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in longsighted dense billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The substantial, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed immense outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat. Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake." Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!" But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading." East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman." Thou 51!" smiting him with his clenched fist. "Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?" Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause. Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West. But ere the initiatory wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the one-time man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, utmost night's thunder turned our compasses--that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it."" Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale mate, gloomily. Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more calamitous; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetized steel was of no more use than an honest-to-god wife's knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson. Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the honest-to-god man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her. Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all needful orders; while Stubb and Flask--who in some little degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings--likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was corking than their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a sure magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from uncompromising Ahab's. For a space the honest-to-goodness man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the broken copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dotted to the deck." Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck--a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the modest of the sail-maker's needles. Quick!" Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a matter so fantastic as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the sure-enough man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily viable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents." Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as honest as any." Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with spellbound eyes they awaited whatever magical might follow. But Starbuck looked away. With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, respective times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it--whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain--he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at final it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--" Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!" One after another they peered in, for nothing but their ain eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away. In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his calamitous pride. CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line. While now the fated Pequod had been so long adrift this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the like time, and frequently more for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon the habitual slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed middling rate of progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel and angulate log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his delirious oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots." Forward, there! Heave the log!" Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. "Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave." They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea. The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him. Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to speak." Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.""'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it."" I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine't is not worth while disputing,'specially with a superscript, who'll ne'er confess."" What's that? There now's a spotted professor in Queen Nature's granite-founded College; but methinks he's too subservient. Where wert thou born?"" In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir."" Excellent! Thou'st hit the world by that."" I know not, sir, but I was born there."" In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good. Here's a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked in--by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So." The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a tenacious dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the honest-to-goodness reelman to stagger strangely." Hold hard!" Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one prospicient festoon; the tugging log was gone." I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See to it."" There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run unanimous, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"" Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip's missing. Let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here, fisherman. It drags intemperate; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off--we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."" Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm." Away from the quarter-deck!"" The swell idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing." Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?" Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!"" And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy?"" Bell-boy, sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high--looks cowardly--quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip the coward?"" There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down."" What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. "Ah, now, had hapless Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let honest-to-goodness Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the pitch-dark one with the ashen, for I will not let this go."" Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods unmindful of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet wide of the unfermented things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel gallant leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's!"" There go two daft ones now," muttered the sometime Manxman. "One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten line--all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had good have a New line altogether. I'll see Mr. Stubb about it." CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy. Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such solitary waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some degenerate and dire scene. At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of stony islets; the watch--then headed by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively barbarian and unearthly--like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered Innocents--that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman--the one-time mariner of all--declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea. Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus explained the wonder. Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of capital numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this lone the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their special tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men. But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard--a cry and a rushing--and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the down_in_the_mouth of the sea. The life-buoy--a long slender cask--was dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that sunbaked wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a strong one. And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale's ain peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of malevolent in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those unfounded shrieks they had heard the night before. But again the one-time Manxman said nay. The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going to leave the ship's stern unprovided with a buoy, when by sure strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin." A life-buoy of a coffin!" cried Starbuck, starting." Rather queer, that, I should say," said Stubb." It will make a unspoilt enough one," said Flask, "the carpenter here can arrange it easily."" Bring it up; there's nothing else for it," said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. "Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so--the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it."" And shall I nail down the lid, sir?" moving his hand as with a hammer." Aye."" And shall I caulk the seams, sir?" moving his hand as with a caulking-iron." Aye."" And shall I then pay over the like with pitch, sir?" moving his hand as with a pitch-pot." Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no more.--Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me."" He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks. Now I don't like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won't put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I'm ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It's like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I don't like this cobbling sort of business--I don't like it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but uncontaminating, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end. It's the sure-enough woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an previous woman of sixty-five who ran away with a bald-pated young tinker once. And that's the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lone sometime heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the like with pitch; batten them down rigorous, and hang it with the snap-spring over the ship's stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some superstitious former carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they would do the job. But I'm made of snarly Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I'll do the job, now, tenderly. I'll have me--let's see--how many in the ship's company, all told? But I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate, Turk's-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there'll be 30 lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let's to it." CHAPTER 127. The Deck. THE COFFIN LAID UPON TWO LINE-TUBS, BETWEEN THE VICE-BENCH AND THE OPEN HATCHWAY; THE CARPENTER CAULKING ITS SEAMS; THE STRING OF TWISTED OAKUM SLOWLY UNWINDING FROM A LARGE ROLL OF IT PLACED IN THE BOSOM OF HIS FROCK.--AHAB COMES SLOWLY FROM THE CABIN-GANGWAY, AND HEARS PIP FOLLOWING HIM." Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with my humor more_than genially than that boy.--Middle aisle of a church! What's here?"" Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the hatchway!"" Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault."" Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does."" Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?"" I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?"" Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?"" Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something else."" Then tell me; art thou not an unadulterated, all-grasping, intermeddling, monopolising, pagan older scamp, to be one day making legs, and the future day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades."" But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do."" The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?"" Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I'm unbiased enough, sir, for that; but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is wide-cut of it. Hark to it."" Aye, and that's because the lid there's a sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this--there's naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in?" Faith, sir, I've--"" Faith? What's that?"" Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like--that's all, sir."" Um, um; go on."" I was about to say, sir, that--"" Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight."" He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I've heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon honest-to-goodness man, too, right in his middle. He's always under the Line--impassioned hot, I tell ye! He's looking this way--come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I'm the professor of melodious glasses--tap, tap!" (AHAB TO HIMSELF. )" There's a sight! There's a well-grounded! The grizzly woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, broad of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how incorporeal are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the selfsame dreaded symbol of dingy death, by a bare hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the sullen side of earth, that its early side, the theoretical bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most tremendous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!" CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel. Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making in_effect speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the cock-a-hoop sails all fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull." Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the older Manxman. But ere her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was heard." Hast seen the White Whale?"" Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?" Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen descending her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod's main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no schematic salutation was exchanged." Where was he?--not killed!--not killed!" cried Ahab, closely advancing." How was it?" It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day former, while three of the stranger's boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the bloodless hump and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon, the quaternary rigged boat--a reserved one--had been instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this quaternary boat--the fleet keeled of all--seemed to have succeeded in fastening--at least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of bubbling white-hot water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no cocksure alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats--ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction--the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail--stunsail on stunsail--after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to downhearted her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen. The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his ain in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a twofold horizon, as it were." I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain's good coat; mayhap, his watch--he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks--wan in the identical buttons of his eyes--look--it wasn't the coat--it must have been the--"" My boy, my own boy is among them. For God's sake--I beg, I conjure"--here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily received his petition. "For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship--I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it--if there be no other way--for eight-and-forty hours only--only that--you must, oh, you must, and you SHALL do this thing."" His son!" cried Stubb, "oh, it's his son he's lost! I take back the coat and watch--what says Ahab? We must save that boy."" He's drowned with the rest on'em, final night," said the honest-to-god Manx sailor standing behind them; "I heard; all of ye heard their spirits." Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but among the number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had been still another son; as that for a time, the misfortunate father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved for him by his chief mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some unknown organic reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years previous, whose father with the dear but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer's parental love, had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their ain; so that their initiative knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father's lifelike but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern. Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own." I will not go," said the stranger, "till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For YOU too have a boy, Captain Ahab--though but a child, and nestling safely at home now--a child of your Old age too--Yes, yes, you relent; I see it--run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards."" Avast," cried Ahab--" touch not a rope-yarn"; then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every word--" Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before." Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this categoric and utter rejection of his so sincere suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship. Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however lowly, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three marvelous cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs. But by her still halting course and winding, deplorable way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not. CHAPTER 129. The Cabin. (AHAB MOVING TO GO ON DECK; PIP CATCHES HIM BY THE HAND TO FOLLOW. )" Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my ain screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be."" No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use misfortunate me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye."" Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!--and a pitch-dark! and crazy!--but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again."" They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor piffling Pip, whose drowned bones now show clean, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye."" If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be."" Oh good master, master, master!" Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!--Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,--God for ever save thee, let what will befall." (AHAB GOES; PIP STEPS ONE STEP FORWARD. )" Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,--but I'm alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he's missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip? He must be up here; let's try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there's no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll seat me, against the transom, in the ship's full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours gravid admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an rummy feeling, now, when a black boy's host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!--Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?--a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;--seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and let's drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.--Hist! above there, I hear ivory--Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me." CHAPTER 130. The Hat. And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab,--all other whaling waters swept--seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the identical latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;--and now that all his consecutive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes, which it was hardly supportable for lame souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, icy, six months' night sustains its piercing, steady, key gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a exclusive spear or leaf. In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more_than strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the onetime man's despot eye was on them. But did you deeply scan him in his more_than secret confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the deep Parsee's glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked doubtful at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a quavering shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but rattling eyes did plainly say--We two watchmen never rest. Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,--the main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,--his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however still he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a unanimous hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the future day's sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for. He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,--breakfast and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's mystical watch was without intermission as his ain; yet these two never seemed to speak--one man to the early--unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slight verbal interchange. At times, for long hours, without a individual hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance. And yet, somehow, did Ahab--in his ain proper self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,--Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the upstanding rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was satisfying Ahab. At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft,--" Man the mast-heads!"--and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the salient of the helmsman's bell, was heard--" What d'ye see?--sharp! sharp!" But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac sure-enough man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at least, of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them." I will have the initiative sight of the whale myself,"--he said. "Aye! Ahab must have the doubloon! and with his ain hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a individual sheaved block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the early; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,--" Take the rope, sir--I give it into thy hands, Starbuck." Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at final; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,--ahead, astern, this side, and that,--within the wide-cut expanded circle commanded at so great a height. When in working with his hands at some exalted almost isolated place in the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in nonindulgent charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose respective different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a lifelike fatality, if, unprovided with a never-ending watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea. So Ahab's proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision--one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;--it was strange, that this was the selfsame man he should select for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's hands. Now, the initiative time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his head. But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and removed horizon, Ahab seemed not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least careful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight." Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat low than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them. But already the sable wing was before the Old man's eyes; the farsighted hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the shameful hawk darted away with his prize. An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last-place disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that Brobdingnagian height into the sea. CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight. The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew close, all eyes were fixed upon her full beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats. Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, snowy ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse." Hast seen the White Whale?"" Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck." Hast killed him?"" The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," answered the early, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busybodied in sewing together." Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming--" Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"" Then God keep thee, Old man--see'st thou that"--pointing to the hammock--" I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only THAT one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb." Then turning to his crew--" Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then--Oh! God"--advancing towards the hammock with uplifted hands--" may the resurrection and the life--"" Brace forward! Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men. But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their spectral baptism. As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into blazing relief." Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake." In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our distressing burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!" CHAPTER 132. The Symphony. It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly severable in that all-pervading azure; only, the musing air was transparently saturated and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, unassailable, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep. Hither, and thither, on gamy, glided the snowy wings of modest, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, disruptive, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them. Aloft, like a imperial czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and quavering motion--most seen here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away. Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen small Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their quondam sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burned crater of his brain. Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at lowest seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, glad air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel--forbidding--now threw tender arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however headstrong and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop. Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own straight heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there. Ahab turned." Starbuck!"" Sir."" Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struck my inaugural whale--a boy-harpooneer of 18! Forty--forty--forty years ago!--ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the passive land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but modest entrance to any sympathy from the green country without--oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of nonsocial command!--when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before--and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare--fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!--when the poor landsman has had fresh fruit to his everyday hand, and broken the world's saucy bread to my mouldy crusts--away, unanimous oceans away, from that vernal girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the side_by_side day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow--wife? wife?--rather a widow with her husband live! Aye, I widowed that misfortunate girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings one-time Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey--more a demon than a man!--aye, aye! what a forty years' fool--fool--old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or beneficial is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very older, so very, very honest-to-god, Starbuck? I feel deadly light, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!--crack my heart!--stave my brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived decent joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably Old? Close! stand near to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; skillful than to gaze upon God. By the greenish land; by the burnished hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!--low-pitched not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!"" Oh, my Captain! my Captain! imposing soul! grand sure-enough heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck's--wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, agnatic old age! Away! let us away!--this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see sure-enough Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."" They have, they have. I have seen them--some summer days in the morning. About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.""'T is my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!" But Ahab's glance was averted; like a spoilt fruit tree he shook, and cast his net, cindered apple to the soil." What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the with_child sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one undivided star can revolve, but by some unseeable power; how then can this one low heart beat; this one low brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at final on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths--Starbuck!" But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away. Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail. CHAPTER 133. The Chase--First Day. That night, in the mid-watch, when the previous man--as his wont at intervals--stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a perspicacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to some savage isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that singular odor, sometimes to a big distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as potential, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened. The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, speedy stream." Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!" Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their clothes in their hands." What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky." Nothing, nothing sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply." T'gallant sails!--stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!" All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to the independent royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air. "There she blows!--there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!" Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his last perch, some feet above the former look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian's head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his mellow sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans." And did none of ye see it before?" cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him." I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out," said Tashtego." Not the same instant; not the same--no, the doubloon is mine, Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first. There she blows!--there she blows!--there she blows! There again!--there again!" he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets." He's going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, stiff! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; scurvy, gloomy,--quick, quicker!" and he slid through the air to the deck." He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet."" Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!--brace up! Shiver her!--shiver her!--So; well that! Boats, boats!" Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails set--all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth. Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so close his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his full dazzling hump was distinctly seeable, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of ok, fleecy, dark-green foam. He saw the Brobdingnagian, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, whitish forehead, a melodic rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his unbendable wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these were broken again by the clear toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternative with their off-and-on flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the marvellous but shattered pole of a late lance projected from the blank whale's back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the farsighted tail feathers streaming like pennons. A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the snowy bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his refined horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the bridal bower in Crete; not Jove, not that nifty majesty Supreme! did surpass the canonised White Whale as he so divinely swam. On each piano side--coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so all-embracing away--on each brilliant side, the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before. And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the replete terrors of his subaquatic trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an clamant his whole marbleised body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left. With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's reappearance." An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; and he gazed beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an crying; for again his eyes seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell." The birds!--the birds!" cried Tashtego. In long Amerind file, as when herons take wing, the white-hot birds were now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, anticipant cries. Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a bloodless living spot no bigger than a blank weasel, with wondrous celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two longsighted corrupt rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the unascertainable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one asquint sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this grand apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and stand by to stern. Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale's head while yet under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat. Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an inst, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows total within his mouth, so that the retentive, narrow, scrolled humbled jaw curled in_high_spirits up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's head, and reached gamy than that. In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads to gain the utmost stern. And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, infuriated with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all awake and helpless in the selfsame jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the farsighted bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across. At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the 1st to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had made one concluding effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea. Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so that when his huge wrinkled forehead rose--some twenty or more_than feet out of the water--the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray still in_high_spirits into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit with their scud. *This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously described. By this motion the whale must good and most comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him. But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more_than deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,--though he could still keep directionless, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst. From the boat's fragmental stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not succor him; more_than than adequate was it for them to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, 50 that should be the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of the dire zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head. Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was now so near, that Ahab in the water hailed her!--" Sail on the"--but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,--" Sail on the whale!--Drive him off!" The Pequod's prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually parted the blanched whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue. Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles; the tenacious tension of Ahab's bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a time, lying all broken in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as bleak sounds from out ravines. But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, keen hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a solid age of woe, wholly made up of instant intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those stately natures contain the intact circumferences of subscript souls." The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one bended arm--" is it safe?"" Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it." Lay it before me;--any missing men?"" One, two, three, four, five;--there were five oars, sir, and here are five men."" That's good.--Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!--Hands off from me! The eonian sap runs up in Ahab's bones again! Set the sail; out oars; the helm!" It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the added power of the boat did not adequate the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely passable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes--the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her--and then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the final second of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.--" Whose is the doubloon now? D'ye see him?" and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks. As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail still mellow, or to spread one to a still bang-up breadth--thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his ain wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky refreshing troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the sure-enough man's face there now stole some such added gloom as this. Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valorous place in his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed--" The thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!"" What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck."" Aye, sir," said Starbuck drawing near, "'t is a sedate sight; an omen, and an ill one."" Omen? omen?--the dictionary! If the gods think to speak unlimited to man, they will honourably speak straight-out; not shake their heads, and give an former wives' darkling hint.--Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold--I shiver!--How now? Aloft there! D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!" The day was nearly done; only the hem of his aureate robe was rustling. Soon, it was almost morose, but the look-out men still remained unset." Can't see the spout now, sir;--too black"--cried a voice from the air." How heading when concluding seen?"" As before, sir,--straight to leeward."" Good! he will travel dull now't is night. Down royals and top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he's making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her full before the wind!--Aloft! come down!--Mr. Stubb, send a new hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning."--Then advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast--" Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now!--the deck is thine, sir!" And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to see how the night wore on. CHAPTER 134. The Chase--Second Day. At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh." D'ye see him?" cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the clean to spread." See nothing, sir."" Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels riotous than I thought for;--the top-gallant sails!--aye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no matter--'t is but resting for the rush." Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one special whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the marvelous skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some nifty natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they will, under sure given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at some farther point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness is almost as established to the perspicacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well near as dependable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the mod railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby's pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman's allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many substantiating subtile matters touching the chase of whales. The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field." By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift motion of the deck creeps up one's legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave fellows!--Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on the sea,--for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!"" There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!" was now the mast-head cry." Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump--blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!" And Stubb did but speak out for well near all that crew. The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like erstwhile wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed, unfearing, unreasoning, heady way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made cracking bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms inconspicuous as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race. They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran into each former in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the tenacious central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fateful goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to. The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of marvelous palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the bright sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in total bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!" Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard." Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears." It was even so; in their headfirst eagerness, the men had mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--much nearer to the ship than the place of the fanciful jet, less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mysterious fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more tremendous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the utmost depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance." There she breaches! there she breaches!" was the cry, as in his immensurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the drab plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its 1st sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale." Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!--Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!--stand by!" Unmindful of the boring rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch." Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat--a spare one, rigged the afternoon previous. "Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine--keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!" As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab's boat was primal; and cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head,--that is, pull straight up to his forehead,--a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale's sidelong vision. But ere that snug limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning himself into ferocious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among the boats with subject jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat, seemed only captive on annihilating each freestanding plank of which those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's unearthly slogan tore every early cry but his to shreds. But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more terrible charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again--hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls--when lo!--a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks! Caught and twisted--corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, open harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's boat. Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached within--through--and then, without--the rays of steel; dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice sundering the rope near the chocks--dropped the intercepted fagot of steel into the sea; and was all immobile again. That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the former lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odoriferous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch. While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and early floating furniture, while aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an hollow vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the former man's line--now parting--admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;--in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils,--Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by unseeable wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his extensive forehead against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again--gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it, like seals from a sea-side cave. The beginning uprising momentum of the whale--modifying its direction as he struck the surface--involuntarily launched him along it, to a little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a traveller's methodic pace. As before, the paying_attention ship having descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no fateful or even grievous ill seemed to have befallen any one. As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively well-to-do float; nor did it so exhaust him as the late day's mishap. But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the world-class to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one unforesightful sharp splinter." Aye, aye, Starbuck,'t is sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has."" The ferrule has not stood, sir," said the carpenter, now coming up; "I put secure work into that leg."" But no bones broken, sir, I hope," said Stubb with lawful concern." Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!--d'ye see it.--But even with a broken bone, honest-to-goodness Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more_than me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze one-time Ahab in his ain proper and unobtainable being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?--Aloft there! which way?"" Dead to leeward, sir."" Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare boats and rig them--Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat's crews."" Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir."" Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!"" Sir?"" My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane--there, that shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot be!--missing?--fast! call them all." The sure-enough man's hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there." The Parsee!" cried Stubb--" he must have been caught in--"" The black vomit wrench thee!--run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle--find him--not gone--not gone!" But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere to be found." Aye, sir," said Stubb--" caught among the tangles of your line--I thought I saw him dragging under."" MY line! MY line? Gone?--gone? What means that piddling word?--What death-knell rings in it, that sure-enough Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,--500'ye see it?--the bad iron, men, the white whale's--no, no, no,--blistered fool! this hand did dart it!--'t is in the fish!--Aloft there! Keep him nailed--Quick!--all hands to the rigging of the boats--cod the oars--harpooneers! the irons, the irons!--hoist the royals high-pitched--a pull on all the sheets!--helm there! steady, steady for your life! I'll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay him yet!" Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck;" never, never wilt thou capture him, old man--In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone--all proficient angels mobbing thee with warnings:--" What more wouldst thou have?--Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the terminal man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the goddamned world? Oh, oh,--Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more_than!"" Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw--thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand--a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed.'T was rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.--Stand round me, men. Ye see an older man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot.'T is Ahab--his body's part; but Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear THAT, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick--two days he's floated--tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men, he'll rise once more,--but only to spout his final! D'ye feel brave men, brave?"" As fearless fire," cried Stubb." And as mechanical," muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he muttered on: "The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!--The Parsee--the Parsee!--gone, gone? and he was to go before:--but still was to be seen again ere I could perish--How's that?--There's a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line of judges:--like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain. I'LL, I'LL solve it, though!" When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward. So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns in the terminated and heedful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab's wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due eastward for the other sun. CHAPTER 135. The Chase.--third Day. The morning of the third day dawned fair and brisk, and once more the solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar." D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight." In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. Helm there; unshakable, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the inaugural of its throwing overt to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; THAT'S tingling enough for deadly man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our miserable hearts throb, and our piteous brains beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm--frozen calm, this older skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the gross clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!--it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a repellent, pitiful world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet,'t is a stately and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitter blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing--a noble thing than THAT. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most limited, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there's something all brilliant and benignant in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and unfaltering, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mighty Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the perpetual Poles! these like Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them--something so unchangeable, and full as secure, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d'ye see?"" Nothing, sir."" Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM--that's bad; I might have known it, too. Fool! the lines--the harpoons he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the steady look outs! Man the braces!" Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed knockout upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her ain white wake." Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw," murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. "God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!"" Stand by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket." We should meet him soon."" Aye, aye, sir," and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once more Ahab swung on high. A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held long breaths with lancinating suspense. But at utmost, some three points off the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it." Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this 3rd time, Moby Dick! On deck there!--brace penetrating up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too far off to low yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one more adept round look aloft here at the sea; there's time for that. An honest-to-god, old sight, and yet somehow so immature; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!--the like!--the same to Noah as to me. There's a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere--to something else than usual land, more flourishing than the palms. Leeward! the livid whale goes that way; look to windward, then; the effective if the bitterer quarter. But effective bye, good bye, Old mast-head! What's this?--green? aye, diminutive mosses in these warped cracks. No such dark-green weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the difference now between man's one-time age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both grow one-time together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that's all. By heaven this dead wood has the good of my live flesh every way. I can't compare with it; and I've known some ships made of utter trees outlast the lives of men made of the most lively stuff of vital fathers. What's that he said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more thou told'st dreaded truth as touching thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head--keep a beneficial eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the lily-white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail." He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven blue air to the deck. In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the mate,--who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck--and bade him pause." Starbuck!"" Sir?"" For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."" Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."" Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!"" Truth, sir: saddest truth."" Some men die at ebb tide; some at humbled water; some at the full of the flood;--and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am sometime;--shake hands with me, man." Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue." Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble heart--go not--go not!--see, it's a brave man that weeps; how bang-up the agony of the persuasion then!"" Lower away!"--cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand by the crew!" In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern." The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabin-window there;" O master, my master, come back!" But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on. Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the initiatory sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks--a matter sometimes well known to affect them,--however it was, they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others." Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with his eyes the receding boat--" canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?--lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical tertiary day?--For when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the 2nd the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing--be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet anticipative,--fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown terrific blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming? My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,--beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!--stave it off--move, move! speak aloud!--Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the hill?--crazed;--aloft there!--keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--" Mark well the whale!--Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he tears the vane"--pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--" Ha! he soars away with it!--Where's the honest-to-god man now? see'st thou that sight, oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!" The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads--a down pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the sound silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow." Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!" Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in panoptic circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterranean hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a flimsy drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an crying like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like New milk round the marble trunk of the whale." Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's bracing irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his encompassing white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar. While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one total flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the retiring night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned broad upon honest-to-goodness Ahab. The harpoon dropped from his hand." Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long lean breath--" Aye, Parsee! I see thee again.--Aye, and thou goest before; and this, THIS then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the terminal letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--Where's the whale? gone down again?" But he looked too near the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the terminal encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,--which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his ain straight path in the sea." Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow him, not too swiftly, at a wise interval. Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast. Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was lawful, the White Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's terminal start had not been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip." Heed them not! those teeth but give fresh rowlocks to your oars. Pull on!'tis the good rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding water."" But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow modest and small!"" They will last long enough! pull on!--But who can tell"--he muttered--" whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?--But pull on! Aye, all alive, now--we near him. The helm! take the helm! let me pass,"--and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat. At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely forgetful of its advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled round his not_bad, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the despised whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the exact instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects--these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instantaneous two of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the tertiary man helplessly dropping astern, but still flooded and swimming. Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!" What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!--'t is whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him!" Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it--it may be--a bombastic and noble foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam. Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. "I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night?"" The whale! The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen." Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever too later, Ahab may slide this lowest, utmost time upon his mark! I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?" But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst through, and in an instantaneous almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water. Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's mast-head hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his ain forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he." The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say--ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his stern brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!"" Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's ain unwinking eye? And now miserable Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too lenient; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there'll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over salt-cured death, though;--cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"" Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now come to her, for the voyage is up." From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, unceasing malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell categorical upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume." The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat;" its wood could only be American!" Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the former bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent." I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,--death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the terminal fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one mutual pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!" The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did unmortgaged it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the sound eye-splice in the rope's net end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths. For an insistent, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentrical circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and breathless, all round and round in one vortex, carried the small chip of the Pequod out of sight. But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with dry coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;--at that inst, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the receptive air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet fast to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its liberal fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submersed savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. Now lowly fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the not_bad shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. Epilogue" AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job. The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?--Because one did survive the wreck. It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the concluding day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its swell buoyancy, rising with majuscule force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one unscathed day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the 2d day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. 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