Second book generated for NaNoGenMo 2014

NaNoGenMo14 book 2

white in sources/moby_dick.txt

 One of our harpooneers told me that he caught
once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over

"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 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 tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath--"The
Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin 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 I remembered a story of
a white man--a whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been
tattooed by them 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 purplish yellow one
And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep
gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing
bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the
tormented deep 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 white bolts, upon his prison So full 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 the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow
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 The long rows of
teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white
ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from
the bows Don't stave the boats needlessly,
ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent There was a corporeal humility in looking up at
him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to
beg truce of a fortress So that no white 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 whole 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 barbaric
white leg upon which he partly stood 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 Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"

"Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!

"If ye see a white 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 whale--did ye mark that, man?
Look ye--there's something special in the wind He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of
all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any
other of them

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black 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 white 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

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned
sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still
deferential cubs Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the
white waiter who waits upon cannibals

But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high 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

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 crooked 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 white 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 white whale Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water;
if ye see but a bubble, sing out

"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same that
some call Moby Dick "Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?"

"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?" said the
Gay-Header deliberately

"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, 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 big one, like a whole
shock of wheat, and 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 Aye, aye," he shouted with
a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose;
"Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor
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 white whale on both sides of land, and
over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out"

"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the
excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for
Moby Dick!"

"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout 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 If man
will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside
except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that
wall, shoved near to me That inscrutable thing is
chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale
principal, I will wreak that hate upon him 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


I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I
sail The white whale
is their demigorgon (QUIETLY SMOKING) That's a white man; he calls that fun:
humph! I save my sweat Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!

SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM) Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall!
But those chaps there are worse yet--they are your white squalls, they
White squalls? white 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 old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh,
thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on
this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no
bowels to feel fear!



CHAPTER 41 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 peculiar snow-white wrinkled
forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of
his more desperate 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 direful wrath into the serene, exasperating
sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal 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 white whale, he
pitted himself, all mutilated, against it He piled upon
the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt
by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a
mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it


What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
was to me, as yet remains unsaid It was the whiteness of the whale
that above all things appalled me

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as
if imparting some special virtue of its own, 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 other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings
of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard;
and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;
and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome,
having for the imperial 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 significant of gladness, for among
the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal
sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many
touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age;
though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt
of wampum was the deepest 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 higher mysteries of the most
august 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 holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove
himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the
noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was
by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
creature being held the purest 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, 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, white robes are given to the redeemed, and
the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white
throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all
these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable,
and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea
of this hue, which strikes more 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
terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds
Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white 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 loathsome than terrific, 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 deeper into this matter, that it is not
the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
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 celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together
two such opposite 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 white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the
same quality in the Polar quadruped 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 spiritual
wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great,
unflattering laureate, Nature From my forenoon watch
below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the
main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
with a hooked, Roman bill sublime As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white
thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of
towns

I assert, then, that in the wondrous 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 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 Nor
can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble
horse, that it was his spiritual 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 substantive
deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him
more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion 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 grand 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 Can we, then,
by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of
whiteness--though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,
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 For Lima has taken the white veil; and
there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe Old as Pizarro,
this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful
greenness of complete 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 prime agent in exaggerating the terror of
objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative 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

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
similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his
ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky 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 horrible 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 blue 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 eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
altitudes, and the natural 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
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
to break the fixed trance of whiteness

But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but
a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo,
Ishmael

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 portentous--why, as we have seen, it is at once the
most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very 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 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 wide landscape of snows--a colourless, all-colour
of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory
of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately
or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent
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 mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
principle of light, for ever remains white 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 wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him 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 old man had found the awful motive
to his vengeance

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not
but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary
whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual
recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the
thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes For the peculiar
snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but
be unmistakable For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming,
unappeasedly steadfast 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 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 lofty
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 old tortoise with mystic 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 classic scholar The
figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white
tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips 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 aboriginal natives of the Manillas;--a race notorious for
a certain 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 old man at their head, "All ready
there, Fedallah?"

"Ready," was the half-hissed reply 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 greenish white
water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and
suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
rolling billows
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 crazed colt from the prairie

The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more
visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows
flung upon the sea
There's white water again!--close to! Spring!"

Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
that the other boats had got fast; 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 The whole
crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
white curdling cream of the squall

The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
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

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 But calm, snow-white, and unvarying;
still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us
on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried It was the private
property of three confederate 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'

"For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and
most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and
affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room
and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman
arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or
broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk
counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires
stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly
corrupt and often lawless life Dominic! Sir sailor, but do
whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?'

"'A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;--but
that would be too long a story 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 But to such unresting vigilance over
their dangerous allies was this small 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
weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so
heavy a vessel

"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 dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
destroyed him" In one of those plates the
whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles,
with white bears running over their living backs 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 black stormy distance the ship is bearing down
upon the scene And all the while
the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of
tumultuous white 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

As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage

In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills

Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the
ideas of mildness and repose with the first 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

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild 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 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 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 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 rich to supply a substitute for
butter 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 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 Espied by some timid man-of-war or
blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the
swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in
the sun, and the white spray heaving high 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 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 broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its
quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies
of the oarsmen But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of
tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or
both the boats must be fast 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

In most cases this lower 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 curious articles,
including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips"


*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 lower jaw


The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb
of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand
infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole
extent

Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber
and sanctum sanctorum of the whale Nevertheless, he stuck
to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him,
because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one,
like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet In that fine, loose, chivalrous 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 nigh to
capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;--that was
a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask Blinding vapours of foam and white-fire! The
three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong 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 The next moment, relieved in great part
from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are
scared from it into the sea 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 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 white mist, continually
rising and falling away to leeward And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby
Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
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
It seemed formed of detached 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

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 general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating
token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange
perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive
it in the whale, they say he is gallied

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 white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
the 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

In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
one eccentric span

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 After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first
cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer As they narrated to each other
their unholy 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 huge 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 laden with fire, and burning
a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the
material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul This is the reason why the decks never
look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil 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

"Hast seen the White Whale!"

"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head
like a mallet 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 "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; free the fast-fish--an old trick--I
know him 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
second 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 white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was
all chips

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic 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 The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the
tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white
billiard-ball He makes a
fierce red flame there!

Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work With his snow-white new
ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his
back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old
courses again 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 little 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 own 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 blue heavens; and so form the
white breakers of the milky way Is not this
harpoon for the White Whale?"

"For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them
thyself, man "The corpusants! the corpusants!"

All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
three gigantic wax tapers before an altar 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
preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue
flames on his body "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 Oh, sir, let old Perth now come
and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I
will not let this go 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 blue of the
sea
"How was it?"

It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, 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 white hump and head of Moby Dick had
suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon,
the fourth rigged boat--a reserved one--had been instantly lowered in
chase In the
distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam
of bubbling white 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"

"They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come
crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs!
What an odd 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


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 very 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 successive 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 sufferable for feeble souls to see

Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white 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

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
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,
troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went
the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical
rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters
interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake;
and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side But
these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly
feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to
some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but
shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white 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 long tail feathers streaming like pennons Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering
eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,
rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that
great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so
divinely swam Hoveringly
halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered
over the agitated pool that he left

In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white 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,
expectant cries But suddenly as he peered down and down into its
depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose,
till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked
rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable
bottom The bluish
pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's
head, and reached higher than that

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 vast wrinkled forehead rose--some twenty or more feet
out of the water--the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray
still higher into the air 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 white whale from his victim

Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine
caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily strength did
crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a time, lying
all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot
of herds of elephants Nor white whale,
nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
inaccessible being
The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,--d'ye see it?--the forged
iron, men, the white whale's--no, no, no,--blistered fool! this hand did
dart it!--'tis in the fish!--Aloft there! Keep him nailed--Quick!--all
hands to the rigging of the boats--collect the oars--harpooneers!
the irons, the irons!--hoist the royals higher--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 About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular 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 hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
white wake Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward,
then; the better if the bitterer quarter We'll talk to-morrow, nay,
to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
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 Retribution, swift vengeance,
eternal 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

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago


black in sources/moby_dick.txt



Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand,
and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb A hundred black
faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black 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" True enough,
thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou
reasonest well

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous,
black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three
blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast This accomplished, however, he
turned round--when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of
a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large
blackish looking squares But at that moment he chanced to turn his face
so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be
sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that
this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner They were
nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second 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 The
chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and
women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders,
masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit What bitter blanks in those
black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those
immovable 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 Between the marble
cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back
was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating
against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy
breakers

     "In black distress, I called my God,
     When I could scarce believe him mine,
     He bowed his ear to my complaints--
     No more the whale did me confine He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not
the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the
mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after
him
And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep
gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing
bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the
tormented deep 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 second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like
two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--Jonah
did the Almighty's bidding Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw
the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes,
fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a
thousand devils Do
you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an
insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?--to do
the will of God--THAT is worship

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears,
swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an
old doorway 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 prodigious black pots too! Are these last 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 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 It was of a conical shape, some ten
feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken
from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a
vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation
of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime He was but
shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a
black handkerchief investing his neck For, like his nose, his short, black
little pipe was one of the regular features of his face Tashtego's
long, lean, sable hair, his high 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 great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal
forests of the main

Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called,
because blackness is the rule among almost all whales

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black 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 white below And what with the standing
spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous
visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life was one
continual lip-quiver Now, it was plainly a labor of love
for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed
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 broken-down
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 little case-bottle, so nicely
tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand And this is what ye have
shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and
over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out 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 The sky-born,
high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!

MALTESE SAILOR
Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the
sky--lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm quarried
out of it!

SPANISH SAILOR
White squalls? white 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 old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh,
thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on
this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no
bowels to feel fear!



CHAPTER 41

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon the
sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that
he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal 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 wild
creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he
smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of
former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black
bisons of distant Oregon?

No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
knowledge of the demonism in the world"

Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during
a black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
hospitable shore A rumpled Chinese
jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers
of the same dark stuff As for Fedallah, who was seen
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
displayed his naked chest with the whole 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 Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their
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 And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the
black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane
soul were in anguish and remorse for the long 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 guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed
condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat
that black air without any horizon

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the
time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,
manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed
his mates

"It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven
of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last
hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black 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 next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their
keen mincing knives (long, 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 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 black stormy distance the ship is bearing down
upon the scene

In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black
weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian
cliffs His jets are erect, 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 great bowels below 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 black cloud, rising up
with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the
excited seamen Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked
more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else And as in the
great 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 first time beholds this species of the
leviathans of the sea 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 Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you
heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on
their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the
bigness of a human head

"Cook, cook!--where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening
his legs still further, as if to form a more secure 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 old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously
roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable 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 dead 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 arched back
still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as
to bring his best ear into play In the first place, how old are you,
cook?"

"What dat do wid de 'teak," said the old black, testily"

"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

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

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert"

"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 black 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

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
whole, 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 And when he glanced upon the green 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
same 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 atheistical 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 to drag the firm
thing from its place

"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 vast black bulks, leaving a
narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths" Now this
was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or
Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices

In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
one eccentric span 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 little black was
brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous
ebony, panelled in king's cabinets Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his
crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though
the loftiest and the brightest Not the wondrous
cistern in the whale's huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower
jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so
surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,--longer than
a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black
as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous 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 As they narrated to each other
their unholy 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 huge 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 laden with fire, and burning
a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the
material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul And there is a Catskill
eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges,
and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces 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 Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green
miser'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds
blackberrying But, Lord, look you, sir--hearts and souls
alive, man--the next 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, perpendicular in the air, like a marble
steeple
In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came 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 What's Prometheus about there?--the
blacksmith, I mean--what's he about?

He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now I do deem it now a most meaning 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 So, it
being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the
slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight
sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above


Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in
these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active
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 little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their
various weapons and boat furniture

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 And darker yet to
tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into
his family's heart 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 young and loving healthy 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 old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon
him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a
truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and
all of them a care-killing competency 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 Thou should'st go mad, 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 hard
usage as it had?"

"I think so, sir"

"And I suppose thou can'st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never
mind how hard 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, 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
best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work"

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 last 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 Oh,
Pip! thy wretched 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

As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like POKE or stomach skin of
the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched
hands of the crew

And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black,
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 I'll soon take that black from your brow

The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole; and
the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare
upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which
gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach Yonder, to windward,
all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up
there; but not with the lightning Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic
jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed
the black cloud from which the thunder had come Oh, sir, let old Perth now come
and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I
will not let this go Come!
I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
Emperor's!"

"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman"

"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
fidelity of man!--and a black! 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 little Pip, whose
drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin
Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great
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 odd 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

But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes; the long
hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with
his prize Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and
on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while
from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly
discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea
Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go
flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by,
stand by! Lower me, Mr

"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 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!--'tis 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
larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing
prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam 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 great buoyancy, rising with great
force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and
floated by my side


man in sources/moby_dick.txt

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville

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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 As touching the
ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these
extracts are solely valuable 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

"Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared

"What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit

"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or
State--(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man

"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

"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 It is a matter of great
astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting,
and, in a commercial point of view, so important an animal (as the Sperm
Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited
so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant
and the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes

"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 dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe
     "Where away?" demanded the captain

"The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied
to the root of his tail 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 He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of
the Saco But BEING
PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man
receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly
believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account
can a monied man enter heaven In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it It came in as
a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances"


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 high tragedies, and short and
easy 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 various 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 own unbiased freewill
and discriminating judgment A boggy,
soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic
fish? even the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom
I conversed upon the subject The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a
great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three
dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to
spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself
upon the three mast-heads 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 The original iron entered
nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a
man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the
hump 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 old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors
deliriums and death"

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 objectionable, why rather than wander
further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with
the half of any decent man's blanket But
the fare was of the most substantial kind--not only meat and potatoes,
but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in
a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful
manner 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 I have
seldom seen such brawn in a man 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

No man prefers to sleep two in a bed

"With heads to be sure; 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 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 intimate and confidential one in the highest
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 first place, you will be so good as to unsay
that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good
evidence that this harpooneer is stark 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 criminal prosecution But be easy, be easy,
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
(great 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"

This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable 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 dangerous man 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 large seaman's bag,
containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk I remembered a story of
a white man--a whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been
tattooed by them And what is it,
thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any
sort of skin 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 purplish yellow one 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 It was now quite plain that he must be some
abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South
Seas, and so landed in this Christian country Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that
this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire,
and still hastier 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 polite offer of
it to the little negro All these strange
antics were accompanied by still stranger 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 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 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 But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed with me


Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown
over me in the most loving and affectionate manner Nevertheless,
a man like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well
worth unusual regarding
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 private when putting on his
boots He was just enough civilized
to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners

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 indecorous figure that
Queequeg made, staving about with little 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 So, if any one man, in his own
proper person, afford stuff for a good 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 laughable about him,
be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for That man next him looks a few shades
lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him

They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease
in manner, quite self-possessed in company But perhaps the
mere 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 best mode of attaining a high social
polish

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
good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every
man maintained a profound silence Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the
slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas--entire
strangers to them--and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here
they sat at a social breakfast table--all of the same 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 His greatest 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 imminent
jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors;
but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;
savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh

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 other sights still
more curious, certainly more comical Whence came
they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?

Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
mansion, and your question will be answered 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 final
day


In this same 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 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 bleak
tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh

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 other world, we prefix
so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if
he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the
Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what
eternal, 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 unspeakable 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
whole city Yes, there is death in this business of whaling--a
speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity


I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain 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 He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his
youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry 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 instant 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 reverential dexterity, hand
over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel Can it be,
then, that by that act of physical 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 perennial well of water within the walls

This ended, in prolonged solemn 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 dismal gloom,
     While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
     And lift me deepening down to doom 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 See ye
not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God?
Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with
slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the
shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas Strong intuitions of the man assure
the mariners he can be no innocent So he makes the best 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 '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 'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any honest man that goes a
passenger

"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 straight itself, it
but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung
'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
Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as
one who in that miserable 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 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 white bolts, upon his prison

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly,
with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these
words:

"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press
upon me 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
He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from
home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is--which was the only 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 own companionship; always equal to
himself 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 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 old rules would
not apply 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

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 own 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 On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low
tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the
water They put him down among
the sailors, and made a whaleman of him Upon
this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my
intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for
an adventurous whaleman to embark from To this, in
substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet
he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of
assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate
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 own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon 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 Now a certain grand merchant ship once
touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts, a very
stately punctilious 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 So full 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

"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there," pointing
to the still shivering greenhorn

Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at
all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies

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
experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last,
launching a navy of great 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 mightiest animated mass that has survived the
flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea
Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that
his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless 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 For years he knows not the land; so
that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more
strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow
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 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 prodigious black pots too! Are these last 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 Hussey?"

But being in a great 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
concerning the nearest 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

I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
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 whole, but in all
cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs 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

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod
Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded
another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the
principal owners of the Pequod,--this old 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 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 triangular opening
faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a
complete 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

There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of
the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,
and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;
only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest
wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from
his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
together

"Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?"
he demanded
But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?--it looks
a little suspicious, 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 full of his insular prejudices, and rather
distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
Vineyard"

"Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,
young man Clap
eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one
leg"

"What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?"

"Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured,
chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest 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 peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed
I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident"

"Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou
dost not talk shark a bit Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's
throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!"

"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

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 general retain in an uncommon measure the
peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified
by things altogether alien and heterogeneous

So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture
names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in childhood
naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker
idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure
of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman And when these things
unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular 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 sweet or
savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding
breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental
advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language--that man makes
one in a whole nation's census--a mighty pageant creature, formed for
noble tragedies But,
as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and
still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another
phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman
But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called
serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the
veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally
educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all
his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, 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 Though refusing, from
conscientious 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 contemplative 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 They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
curious story, that when he sailed the old 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 says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship

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 old crony Bildad;
how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore
the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the
whole management of the ship's affairs to these two Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his
jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small 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 young man?"

"Thou knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust do
corrupt, but LAY--'"

LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh! Well, old 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 first deceive a landsman, yet
the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and
seventy-seven 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 good deal less than seven
hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time

"Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to
swindle this young man! he must have more than that"

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
young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those
orphans"

"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 leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the
fiery pit, Captain Peleg"

"Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye
insult me It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that
he's bound to hell

Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal 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 Now then, my young man,
Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael,
for the three hundredth lay

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 ready for sea Any how, young 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 He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak
much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen 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, good man, like Bildad, but
a swearing good man--something like me--only there's a good deal more of
him And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's
better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one Think of that; by that sweet girl that
old 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 full of thoughtfulness; what had been
incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain
wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him


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 greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations,
never mind how comical, 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

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

"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
open 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 rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the
whole case Kill?
The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What's that noise there? You, young
man, avast there!"

And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force
open the door But when
a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive 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 I had seen a sailor who had
visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when
a great 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 great 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 He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and
compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible
young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety" 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 great 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, young man"

"Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with me--explain
thyself, thou young Hittite "Young
man, you'd better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand;
I never heard a better sermon

Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge 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"

"Peleg! Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "thou thyself,
as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what
it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this
ungodly guise "No matter though,
I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--good luck to 'em; and they are
all the better off for it "Ye said true--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"

"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 It
is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great
secret in him "Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this crazy
man But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod
was fully equipped Never did
any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as
everybody called her If I had been
downright honest 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 open 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 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 great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some
of the lower 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 "He's a lively chief mate,
that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to"

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 all this seemed natural 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 He seemed to do most of the talking and
commanding, and not Bildad

"Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!--jump!"--was the next command, and
the crew sprang for the handspikes
Nevertheless, not three days previous, 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 frightful manner 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 vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring,
untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer For loath to depart, yet;
very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a
voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of
his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old 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,--poor 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 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

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 sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon
the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous
voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another
tempestuous term

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us
whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a
butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we
are surrounded by all manner of defilements But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been
all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honour But even
granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery
decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable 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 popular 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 profoundest 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 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 For many years past
the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and
least known parts of the earth
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 great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given
to the enlightened world by the whaleman After its first blunder-born
discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores
as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there The uncounted
isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial 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
first destinations

THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the mighty
triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital,
the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were
the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession 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 fifty
whales I account that man more honourable than that great 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 hushed 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 properly my creditors, find any precious MSS In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil,
unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him
somewhere What
then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted
state, the sweetest of all oils?

Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and
queens with coronation stuff!



CHAPTER 26 He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy
coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard
as twice-baked biscuit It was merely
the condensation of the man A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a
telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds 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 "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 reliable 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 dangerous comrade than a coward

"Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as careful
a man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery" But we shall ere long
see what that word "careful" precisely means when used by a man like
Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter But
it was not in reasonable 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 intrepid 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 terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and
mighty man Men may seem detestable as joint
stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble
and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any
ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their
costliest 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 keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of
a valor-ruined man 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 high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if even the most mournful, 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 ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow
over his disastrous 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 great
democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the
pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves
of finest 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 higher 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 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 valiant; taking perils as they came with an
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
for the year

What, perhaps, with other 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 So utterly lost
was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,
the wondrous 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 As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought
nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided They
called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
be well likened to the short, square 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 They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
Pequod's boats as headsmen

And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when
the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close 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

Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last
remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring
island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers 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 barbaric 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 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 little 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 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 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 The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,
and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the
only 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 Three
better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way,
could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man 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 aged robustness Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially
negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,
who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this
laid eye upon wild Ahab Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the
immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with
preternatural powers of discernment 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 The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in
jewelled 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

Old age is always wakeful; 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"

So, almost every twenty-four 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 disturbing 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 old 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--Down, dog, and kennel!"

Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
scornful old man, Stubb was speechless 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 It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too;
aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever
sailed with 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 frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on
it? A hot old 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 Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and
sleep when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes again Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong
side out 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 little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then,
presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking
at it The living
member--that makes the living insult, my little man While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of
badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the
shoulders, and slews me round Slid! man,
but I was frightened 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 full of marlinspikes, with the points out 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb,
what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it
wasn't a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were
kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb In old England the
greatest 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
old Ahab, and made a wise man of But it's made a wise man of me, Flask D'ye see Ahab
standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing
you can do, Flask, is to let the old 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 white 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 whale--did ye mark that, man?
Look ye--there's something special in the wind

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 As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I
hereupon offer my own poor endeavors I promise nothing complete;
because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very
reason infallibly be faulty


*I am aware 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--This whale, among the
English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter
whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the
French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
Long Words All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
upon--In one respect this is the
most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted
by man 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 sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet
rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with
such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present
pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable
Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back--Another retiring
gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin
in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose But it is only
found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner
something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man It was also
distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the
horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn--This gentleman is famous for
his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes I have lowered for him many times, but
never yet saw him captured 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 But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,
half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by
reputation, but not personally From Icelandic,
Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of
uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names

The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced
by the fact, that originally in the old 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 Specksynder In
those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the navigation
and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting
department and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer
reigned supreme 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 important 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 first lives aft, the last forward

Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest
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
common 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 punctilious
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
shabbiest 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 only 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 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 intellectual superiority what it will,
it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men,
without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always,
in themselves, more or less paltry and base

It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open 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 customary dinner in that
same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of
the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical But he
who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own
private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power
and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of
state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned
sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still
deferential cubs With one mind,
their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife, as he carved
the chief dish before him For, like
the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly
dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were
somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab
forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb Whether he thought the owners
of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear,
sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long 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 last person down at the dinner, and Flask
is the first man up And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with
a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of
accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise 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 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 next; and, as a permanent thing,
residing in the open air

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, to sail ere reaching her proper
cruising ground And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage
she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial
even--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; 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 Great Washington, too, stands high 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 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 nigh
the beach 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 Now, it was plainly a labor of love
for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed
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 broken-down
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 little case-bottle, so nicely
tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand For nowadays, the whale-fishery
furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
sentiment in tar and blubber"
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 mystic ocean at his feet for the visible 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 elusive thoughts that only people the soul by
continually flitting through it

"And what do ye next, men?"

"Lower away, and after him!"

"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"

"A dead whale or a stove boat!"

More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began
to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions

"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, 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 big one, like a whole
shock of wheat, and 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"

"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the
excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for
Moby Dick!"

"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout 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 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 great premium HERE!"

"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it
rings most vast, but hollow All visible objects, man,
are but as pasteboard masks If man
will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside
except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that
wall, shoved near to me Talk not to me of blasphemy,
man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me But not my master, man,
is even that fair play The Pagan
leopards--the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; 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 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 instant searchingly
eyeing every man of his crew

"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the
nearest seaman 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 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 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 Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all
stand before me; and I their match Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve
yourselves! man has ye there


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 Horrible old 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 miserable office,--to obey, rebelling; and worse yet,
to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would
shrivel me up, had I it]


Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human
mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea The long howl thrills me through!
Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like
this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,--as wild, untutored
things are forced to feed--Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent
horror in thee! but 'tis 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)

     Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
     Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
     Our captain's commanded (QUIETLY SMOKING) That's a white man; he calls that fun:
humph! I save my sweat Blood! but that old man's a grand old cove! We are the
lads to hunt him up his whale!

ALL Steady, helmsman! steady) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark
side of mankind--devilish dark at that Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!

SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM)
White squalls? white 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 old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh,
thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on
this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no
bowels to feel fear!



CHAPTER 41 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
solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole 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, direct
and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide
whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby
Dick But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
assaults--not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or
devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those
repeated disastrous 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 Alone, in such remotest waters, that
though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you
would not come to any chiseled 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 mere transit over
the widest 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 new 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

And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former
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 ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood

So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of
the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days
of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long
practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring
warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be
hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition
as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man 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 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

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at
the precise time of his bodily dismemberment That it was only then, on the homeward
voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems
all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage,
he was a raving lunatic; 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 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 direful madness was now gone; even
then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on Human madness is oftentimes a
cunning and most feline thing Ahab's full lunacy
subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson,
when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the
Highland gorge But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of
Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not
one jot of his great natural intellect had perished Winding
far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where
we here stand--however grand and wonderful, now quit it;--and take your
way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;
where far beneath the fantastic 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 great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he
patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of
ages 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 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 Had any one of his
old 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 fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the
profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint

Here, then, was this grey-headed, 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 mere 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 infernal fatality to help him
to his monomaniac revenge How it was that they so aboundingly responded
to the old man's ire--by what evil magic their souls were possessed,
that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much
their insufferable 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

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 vague, nameless horror concerning him,
which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and
yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of
putting it in a comprehensible form

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as
if imparting some special virtue of its own, 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 other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings
of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard;
and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;
and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome,
having for the imperial 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 significant of gladness, for among
the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal
sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many
touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age;
though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt
of wampum was the deepest 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 higher mysteries of the most
august 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 holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove
himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the
noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was
by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
creature being held the purest 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, 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 From my forenoon watch
below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the
main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
with a hooked, Roman bill sublime Goney!
never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious
thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I
learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross
At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, 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 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 Nor
can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble
horse, that it was his spiritual 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

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 Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice
omitted so potent 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 common, hereditary experience of all
mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue 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 grand 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 mortal man to
account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls

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 long, dreary, 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 gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of
that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft,
dewy, distant 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 long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by
the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly
unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading
the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the
Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the
green of the groves--why is this phantom more terrible 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 arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide
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 strangest,
saddest city thou can'st see 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 eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
altitudes, and the natural 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
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
to break the fixed trance of whiteness Though in many of its aspects this visible
world seems formed in love, the invisible 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 portentous--why, as we have seen, it is at once the
most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
things the most appalling to mankind In this manner, they passed the buckets
to fill the scuttle-butt 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

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 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 old man had found the awful motive
to his vengeance No possible endeavor then could enable her commander
to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running
down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time
to cruise there Ah, God! what trances
of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved
revengeful desire God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature
in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a
vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature
he creates

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 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 interior, 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
This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the
other 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
good ground to impeach Like some
poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they
make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they
pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump for
their presumption In fact, did you ever hear what might be
called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you
that upon one particular 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 one, and three that had each
lost a boat's crew For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and
candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was
spilled for it Being returned home at last,
Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another
ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and
breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith
forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since*


*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 short 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 exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary" Again: "At all events, the whole circumstances
taken together, all happening before my own 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

Thirdly: Some eighteen 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"

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

In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too,
of honest wonders--the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier's
old chums--I found a little matter set down so like that just quoted
from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
corroborative example, if such be needed As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work
every way of uncommon value 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 Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm
whale


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 long
habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to
abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage 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 He knew,
for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was
over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual
man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual
mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a
sort of corporeal relation Not only that, but the subtle
insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly
manifested than in his superlative 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 In times of strong emotion
mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent
The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
Ahab, is sordidness Had they been strictly held to their one final
and romantic object--that final and romantic object, too many would have
turned from in disgust Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the
Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing,
he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of
usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew
if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further
obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command
So look the long line of man-of-war's men about to throw themselves on
board an enemy's ship

While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers,
Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, "All ready
there, Fedallah?"

"Ready," was the half-hissed reply But with all their eyes again
riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other
boats obeyed not the command He would say the most terrific 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 easy 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 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 wild conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the
matter from the beginning As for Fedallah, who was seen
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
displayed his naked chest with the whole 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

"Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck

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 Its top is not more spacious 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"

Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the
boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat 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 little man high and dry on his shoulders

At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous
habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously
perverse and cross-running seas 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 greenish white
water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and
suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
rolling billows Only the
silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his
peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty

Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever
heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the
first unknown phantom in the other world;--neither of these can feel
stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first
time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the
hunted sperm whale
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, the sign
and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the
midst of despair


There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical
joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than
suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own 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

"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last 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 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 Flask, for an
oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's
jaws?"

"Can't you twist that smaller?" said Flask 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 Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"

"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," said Flask"

"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel 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 individual 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 general 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 extra men, as that same boat's
crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod 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 open 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 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 peculiar 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 He was such a creature as
civilized, domestic 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 primal generations, when the memory of
the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other 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 And yet,
though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred
would venture a lowering for them

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread The
best 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
On life and death this old man walked

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

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the
time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,
manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed
his mates Meantime, the crew
driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous 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 same 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 old 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


Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this
gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose Though in the course of his continual
voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to
any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings
There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep
helpless sadness than the insane old 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 old 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 very point whence we started, where those that
we left behind secure, were all the time before us But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
tormented 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 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 apt 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 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
infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each
other's villanous likenesses And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has
no proper foundation for his superior altitude Hence, I conclude,
that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that
assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on
Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees 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 comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often
steers himself with a pretty little milliner's tiller decorated with
gay cords and ribbons And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of
any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew
must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of
the number, that subordinate 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 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 slightest particle by catching hold of anything with
his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he
generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being
generally very large, 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 critical moment or
two, in a sudden squall say--to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's
hair, and hold on there like grim death

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

"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 good Golden Inn In truth, well nigh the
whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous 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 Now,
gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
large 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 agrarian freebooting impressions popularly
connected with the open 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 large part, are shored by two great
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 lofty 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
direful 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 And for Radney, though in his
infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse
at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our
austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as
vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh
from the latitudes of buck-horn handled bowie-knives Yet was this
Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a
mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible
firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition
which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had
long been retained harmless and docile

"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 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, 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
superior in general 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 subaltern's tower, and
make a little heap of dust of it Be this conceit of mine as it may,
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a
head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings
of your last 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

"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

"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 Besides, it was the stronger 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 trivial business not connected with truly nautical
duties, such being the case with his comrades 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 To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most
domineering and outrageous 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 spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
all his first 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 the incensed Radney shook the
hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do
his bidding Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not
the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his
twisted hand he warned off the foolish 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' But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where
the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of
his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions 'We have seen many whale-ships in our
harbours, but never heard of your Canallers'

"For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and
most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and
affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room
and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman
arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or
broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk
counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires
stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly
corrupt and often lawless life
Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of
these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful;
but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of
violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger
in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy 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
young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal
furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian
corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric
seas'

"I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay But sliding down the
ropes like baleful 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 twisted 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 atrocious
scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck Fearing in his heart
lest this might prove but too true, 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 Not a man of us
turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us

"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'

"'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

"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 heavy brass padlock belonging to the
companionway 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
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 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 perfidious
allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a man who had been
fully ripe for murder '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 good 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

"'Best not,' hissed the Lakeman

"Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible 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

"'You are a coward!' hissed the Lakeman

"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 own 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
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

"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'

"'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length
before him; 'but I think it will answer 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--nigh
to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to
the seaman's hand--that fatal hour was then to come; and in the
fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and
stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in

"It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
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--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 little time past it had been
plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads The mutineer was the bowsman of the
mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him, while
Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken
the line, at the word of command He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat 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

"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 own thoughts 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 After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the
ship as far off shore as possible; 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 best whale-boat, steered straight
before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a
reinforcement to his crew 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

"'Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt;
'no lies If I do not, may lightning strike
me!'

"'A pretty scholar,' laughed the Lakeman


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 own 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
curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day
confidently challenge the faith of the landsman George's; ever
since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not
only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
presentations of him The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of
that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable
avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came
into being 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 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
old and new--that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature,
imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases

In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will
at times meet with very curious 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 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 long
experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its
counterpart in nature And what sort of lively lads with the pencil
those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
surprising after all The living whale,
in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in
unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight,
like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a
thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the
air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations 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
old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics;
yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's
articulated bones 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 But
all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human
fingers in an artificial covering 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 single
incomputable 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 But my life for it he
was either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously
tutored by some experienced whaleman Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right
whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale,
and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats
us to a series of classical 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
magnified Arctic snow crystals Any time these ten years,
they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that
stump to an incredulous world But, though for ever mounted on
that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with
downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man
to that condition in which God placed him, i 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 With the
same marvellous 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 close 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 old Dutch savage, Albert
Durer 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 exact
intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else
so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise,
previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the
Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed
Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them

On the second 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
wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated
from the water that escaped at the lip

But though, to landsmen in general, 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 superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific
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 stateliest, stiffest 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

Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened
and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
precisely the same manner the live 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 own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
spawned Consider also the devilish
brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks

Consider all this; and then turn to this 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, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the
half known life 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 Almost forgetting for
the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous
phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind For though other 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 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

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 opposite 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
common quill, prevents it from slipping out All the
oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid
eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest
snakes sportively festooning their limbs Nor can any son of mortal
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 horrible
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 little 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 So that at last
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 And obeying his own 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 steady 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 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 tremendous leading stroke
which the eager Indian gave

"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


*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 other ships, a wooden piggin, or
bailer, is set apart for that purpose Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging
to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of
Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring
down his centre of gravity

"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 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

According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost
oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar 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 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 absent 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 second critical instant,
that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer
likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
themselves and every one else It is then they change places; and
the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper
station in the bows of the boat The headsman should stay in the bows from first to
last; 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
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 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 customary 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 By
adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other 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 smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with
its broad flukes or lobes 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 small, helping
cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you
heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on
their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the
bigness of a human head

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 dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole
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 jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm
whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea

"Cook, cook!--where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening
his legs still further, as if to form a more secure 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 old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously
roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable 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 dead 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 arched back
still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as
to bring his best ear into play Talk to
'em gentlemanly"

"Cook," said Stubb, squaring himself once more; "do you belong to the
church?"

"Passed one once in Cape-Down," said the old man sullenly 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 I'm bressed if
he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the old man,
limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock


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
outlandish 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 great delicacy in France, and commanded large
prices there Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into
some other substance, and then partaking of it that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea,
and eat it too by its own 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 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 tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean 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 light, 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 very ox
you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring
that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl 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 whole round sea was one huge 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 small 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 light over the turbid
sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an
incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep
into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part


*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel;
is about the bigness of a man's spread hand; and in general shape,
corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its
sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than
the lower

In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other 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 lower mast-head, the strongest
point anywhere above a ship's deck Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to
stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few
sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain;
so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip,
called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
the many marvels he presents What would
become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the
North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are
found exceedingly brisk 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 How wonderful is it then--except after explanation--that
this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it
is to man; how wonderful 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 Oh, man! admire and model thyself after
the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice Peter's, and like the
great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own
Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious
flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting
poniards in the whale Espied by some timid man-of-war or
blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the
swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in
the sun, and the white spray heaving high 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 Bear
in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many
feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so
much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus
made, he must skilfully steer clear 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 first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable
till the body is stripped 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
"That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better
man--Where away?"

"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to
us!

"Better and better, man 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 smallest
atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind

By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mast-heads
proved her a whale-ship Thereby, the whale
commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at
considerable distances and with no small facility

Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular
appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities
make up all totalities He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled
all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair

So soon as this figure had been first 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
previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho 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 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
individual's intention was to land him in the first convenient port, the
archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials--devoting the ship
and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention was
carried out So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew,
that at last 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 The consequence of all
this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and
mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher 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 Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking
in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as
his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others

"I fear not thy epidemic, man," said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain
Mayhew, who stood in the boat's stern; "come on board

"Hast thou seen the White Whale?" demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted
back 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 perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last
succeeded in getting one iron fast Not a
chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman's head; but the
mate for ever sank
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
strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one,
when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is
discernible; the man being stark dead This terrible 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" Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started
to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with
downward 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 Thus,
most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after
attaining an age of two or three years or more "Give it me, man
Harry--(a woman's pinny hand,--the man's wife, I'll wager)--Aye--Mr 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 But in very many
cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the
whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded

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 dead
whale's back So that for better 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 Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I
would, I only had the management of one end of it This improvement
upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb,
in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible
guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder A thing altogether incredible were
it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise
miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man 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 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 poor stuff enough

"I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard," said
Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
ignoble a leviathan"

"What's the old 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 old man is hard 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 Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the
old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and
gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home But now, tell me,
Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was
the same you say is now on board the Pequod?"

"Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live
for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? 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 They are the only whales regularly
hunted by man 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 straight side-line of sight;
and about thirty more behind it 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 other 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 great mountain separating
two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the
impressions which each independent organ imparts So long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing
is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing
whatever objects are before him But if you now come to separate 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 contemporary
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 other in an exactly opposite direction? If he
can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able
simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems
in Euclid If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead,
and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such,
alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these
spikes fall with impaling force

As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a
Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded);
so, at a broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant
resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe And
in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with
the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her
progeny At any rate, when you watch those live
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 great 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 One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
"whiskers" inside of the whale's mouth;* another, "hogs' bristles"; a
third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
"There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his
upper CHOP, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth But in this particular, the demand has
long been on the decline To sum up, then: in the Right Whale's there is no great
well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a
lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale's 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 severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by
the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it 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 inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head
altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated 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 mystical 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 But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to
encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell
the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Lais?



CHAPTER 77

"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
How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and
sweetly perished there?



CHAPTER 79 Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful 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 Nor have Gall and
his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the
phrenological characteristics of other beings than man

In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
morning Human or animal, the mystical brow is as
that great golden seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees" 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 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 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 At the high end the skull forms a crater to
bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater--in
another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in
depth--reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain

If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
of its rear 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 It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely
undeveloped skulls But the curious external resemblance, I take it
the Germans were not the first men to perceive For I believe that much of a man's
character will be found betokened in his backbone
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

At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide
intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with
their flag in the Pacific

"What has he in his hand there?" cried Starbuck, pointing to something
wavingly held by the German 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

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 complete 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 last 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

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 Aware of their danger,
they were going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind,
rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness

Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge,
humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted
with the jaundice, or some other infirmity"

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 old 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 "Give way, or the
German will have him At this juncture the Pequod's keels had shot by the three
German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick's
boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his foreign
rivals

"The ungracious and ungrateful dog!" cried Starbuck; "he mocks and dares
me with the very 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 mad; 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 best man 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, DON'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 double view
of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time economically
accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss

"The unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb 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, loose, chivalrous 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 With a shout, they took a
mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter But the bird has a
voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear
of this vast 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 pitiable; while still, in his
amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to
appal the stoutest man who so pitied

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 first fury of the whale's headlong 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 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 eternal blue 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 Who can tell how appalling to the
wounded whale must have been such huge 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
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
oarsman felt them in his seat 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
certain directions"

"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"

But humane Starbuck was too late By very heedful management, when
the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was
strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain
that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the
bottom
However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the
last; 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 clear from it, such was
the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and
cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
accounted for it But there are instances
where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale
again rises, more buoyant than in life

Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend

The more 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
great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many
great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other
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 first whaleman; and
to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale
attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent 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 identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew When the Romans
took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph George and
the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many
old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and
often stand for each other Any man may kill a snake, but only a
Perseus, a St

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though
the creature encountered by that valiant 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 great ignorance
of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;
and considering that as in Perseus' case, St Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even
a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we
harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order
of St

Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer of rejoicing good
deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether
that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary
whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale 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 But then there were some sceptical 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 old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
story was this:--He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
embellished with curious, 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
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 Queequeg believed strongly in anointing
his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau
disappeared, took more 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 What then remained?

Of all the wondrous 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

Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel
in pitchpoling


That for six thousand years--and no one knows how many millions of ages
before--the great 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 close 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
But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular
lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the
disengaged air in the open atmosphere
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 Not so much thy skill, then, O
hunter, as the great 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 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

Reckoning the largest 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 To the student of old Roman
walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin
course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful
relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the
great strength of the masonry As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the
naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive 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

First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in
a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority

Second: It is a little significant, 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 No ribs of man or boat can withstand it At times there are gestures in it, which, though they
would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable
In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long 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 long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded
oriental archipelagoes 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 costliest cargoes of the east

Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among
the low 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 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
and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and
admonished to keep wide awake

Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of
the sea, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the
air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed
like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried
of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height And when he glanced upon the green 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
same 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 atheistical 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 to drag the firm
thing from its place This was still more
strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed
as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the
sea Though banding together in tens of
thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a
solitary horseman Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded
together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they will, at the
slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,
trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death

Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
retreated, but collectively remained in one place

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 But upon flinging the third, in the
act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one
of the seats of the boat, and in an instant tore it out and carried it
away, dropping the oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from
under him The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
exceedingly transparent; 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 mortal nourishment, be still
spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did the
young 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

"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 The milk is very sweet
and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries But at length we perceived that
by one of the unimaginable 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 free 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 After many
similar 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 In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious 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 largest
leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not
more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male In good time, nevertheless, as the ardour
of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends
her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated
Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our
Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life,
forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old
soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his
prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors 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
famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of
those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils Like venerable 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 best of wives she is, though
she keeps so many moody secrets

It frequently happens that when several 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
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 other 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
great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last 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

A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
possibly object to it But ploughed up to the primary rock of the
matter, the two great 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 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 rapacious landlord is the widow's last
mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion
with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the
ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone,
the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation;
what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of
Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese
of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven
without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular L100,000 but a
Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets
but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor
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 whole 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 Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the
jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden

Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat
fish high and dry, promising themselves a good L150 from the precious
oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good
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 But that did in nowise mend the matter,
or at all soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy
of Blackstone Thinking that viewed in some particular
lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard 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 full 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 other 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


It was a week or two after the last 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

Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more
of a nosegay than the first 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
I wonder now if our old man has thought of that Upon her head boards, in
large gilt letters, he read "Bouton de Rose,"--Rose-button, or Rose-bud;
and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship

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"

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 "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 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"

"I know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe
it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before All their
noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms

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 unsavory and unprofitable a pickle
Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man
had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris 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 He was a
small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with
large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red 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"

"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

"What now?" said the Guernsey-man to Stubb

"Why, since he takes it so easy, 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"

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

"Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink
with the man I've diddled"

By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
the Guernsey-man to this effect,--that having a long 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 other 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 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 old Roman tiles and
pottery buried in fat English loam
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 good bye

I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain
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 pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner 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 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 fresh blubber in
small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large 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


It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an
event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own But Pip loved life, and all life's
peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he
had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his
brightness; though, as ere long 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
melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon
into one star-belled tambourine

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 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 Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he
should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving
him too wide 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" Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that
though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which
propensity too often interferes with his benevolence It was
under very similar circumstances to the first 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 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 own timidity, is not always manifested
by the hunters in all similar 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
Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of
the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the
joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous,
God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters
heaved the colossal orbs 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
frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his
God

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed
in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and
when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated
ere going to the try-works, of which anon

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by
many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases
man must eventually lower, 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 A whaleman's nipper is
a short 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 They generally
go in pairs,--a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man 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 sharp 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 While employed in polishing them--one
man in each pot, side by side--many confidential communications
are carried on, over the iron lips As they narrated to each other
their unholy 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 huge 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 laden with fire, and burning
a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the
material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul How glad and how grateful 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 artificial fire, when its
redness makes all things look ghastly So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow
in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped 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, poor 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
wondrous Solomon

But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way
of understanding shall remain" (I But the whaleman, as he
seeks the food of light, so he lives in light

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of
lamps--often but old 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 purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore,
unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral
contrivances ashore


Already has it been related how the great 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
old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded
surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due 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 enormous 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

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 neat commander The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses
a singularly cleansing virtue Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest
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 vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea,
and in their very 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 poor
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 whole weary thing again Oh! my friends, but this
is man-killing! Yet this is life

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

Now this doubloon was of purest, 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 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 The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the
courageous, 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 mysterious self 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 "The old man seems to read
Belshazzar's awful writing Halloa! here's signs and
wonders truly! That, now, is what old 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 arithmetic, I'll try
my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with
the Massachusetts calendar Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if
there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant 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 rear; we are curing the wound, when whang
come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing
himself But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the old
hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea 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 own boat's bow He was
a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or
thereabouts, dressed in a spacious 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 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 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 first they did not seem
to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to
use their sea bannisters 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"

"Aye, aye--they were mine--MY irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--"but on!"

"Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly"

"How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander, "I do not know;
but in biting the line, it got foul 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 other whale's;
that went off to windward, all fluking But, Lord, look you, sir--hearts and souls
alive, man--the next 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, perpendicular in the air, like a marble
steeple But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same
instant, the fish, taking one good 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--clear along the whole length of my arm--came
out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell
you the rest (by the way, captain--Dr"

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) But, heave ahead,
boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man"

"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--said the
imperturbable 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 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 He's all a
magnet! How long since thou saw'st him last? Which way heading?"

"Bless my soul, and curse the foul 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

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


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 famous whaling house of
Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not
far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point
of real historical interest Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were
the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm
Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the
whole globe who so harpooned him
But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable house again
bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons--how many, their mother only
knows--and under their immediate 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
The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a
Nantucketer

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 old fashions,
touching plenty to eat and drink The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I
concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper Snodhead, a very learned man,
professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and
St Snodhead, so soon as he
spied the book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper,"
but "The Merchant

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, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc Now, as those
polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
including the short 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, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin

But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere 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

Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought
together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his
people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,
chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;
and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores 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 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

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 various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,
jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now
simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his
unobstructed bones Still more, for the
ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the
weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead
attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me
to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not
overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him
out to the uttermost coil of his bowels No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the
flea, though many there be who have tried it

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 same time bearing on
the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back
to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun;
for time began with man I am horror-struck
at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of
the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after
all humane ages are over"

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

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 distinct 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 earlier
ones

But will any whaleman believe these stories? No And if ever I go where Pliny
is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so 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 remotest 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 last man,
smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty 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 polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such
a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that
the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction Though so short a
period ago--not a good 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 wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far
different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an
end to the Leviathan And equally fallacious seems
the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer
haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that
species also is declining

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 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 live bodies of all the men, women, and children
who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to
the present human population of the globe


The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to
his own person And
when after gaining his own deck, and his own 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 additional twist and wrench,
that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet
Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy

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 sweetest
songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable
events do naturally beget their like
The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of
sorrow in the signers With many other
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 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


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 same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary 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 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 miscellaneous matters more directly
pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly
expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and
capricious

The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
soothing lotion
Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping
one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor 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 For nothing was
this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal 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
discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active
in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you,
though you dig foundations for cathedrals He was a pure
manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early
oozed along into the muscles of his fingers

AHAB (ADVANCING)

(DURING THE ENSUING SCENE, THE CARPENTER CONTINUES SNEEZING AT TIMES)


Well, manmaker!

Just in time, sir

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

Sir?

Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a
desirable pattern

What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man?
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols


Carpenter? why that's--but no;--a very tidy, 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

Sir?--oh! ah!--I guess so;--yes--dear!

Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
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 identical place with it; that
is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean Yes, I have heard
something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never
entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still
pricking him at times May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?

It is, man I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with
the wealthiest 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 With his snow-white new
ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his
back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old
courses again Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks,
but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that's a far worse plight
than the Pequod's, man But
look ye, the only 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 further into the cabin,
with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed
not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation
of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself;
"A better 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 But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose,
and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: "Thou hast
outraged, 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 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 subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the
clumsiest casks and see to their stowage For whatever is truly wondrous and
fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books

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 curious favour he
asked
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

Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin
was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches
at its extremities

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 poor fellows ought to be
indulged Pip
was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock 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, ungovernable, 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
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 Launched at
length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified itself Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded
by a patient arm--Most miserable!

A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing
yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the
curiosity of the mariners

He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly
encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin But Death plucked down some
virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the
responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless
old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to
harvest

Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more
and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last;
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 long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her
thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond
in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen
curls!

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death
is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but
the first 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 unimaginable, taking terrors, and
wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite
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
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"

"I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the
melted bones of murderers Is not this
harpoon for the White Whale?"

"For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them
thyself, man

"Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup,
nor pray till--but here--to work!"

Fashioned at last 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 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 common doom), then scepticism, then
disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If

"Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting
a glass and a bottle in the air
Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe;
in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks
furnish tablets; where for long Chinese 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

"Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor
coffin can be thine?"

"And who are hearsed that die on the sea?"

"But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
America"

"Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man"

"Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
like fire-flies in the gloom--"Hemp only can kill thee--I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried
Ahab, with a laugh of derision;--"Immortal on land and on sea!"

Both were silent again, as one man


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 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 poor, pitiful 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 old 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 Aye,"
lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry
thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live
and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
fatalistic 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!--square in!"

In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon
her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon
her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one
sufficient steed Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine,
what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"

"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr)

  Oh! jolly is the gale,
  And a joker is the whale,
  A' flourishin' his tail,--
  Such a funny, 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 funny, 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 funny, 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"

"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own"

"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
mind how foolish?"

"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 shortest way to
Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's
question 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 lower parts of a
ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made
in long 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 "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the
same in the song 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, old man!"

Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed
in its conspicuous 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! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill
continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a
fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this

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 unsafe, 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 And how long
ago is it since you said the very 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 little man, you have
pretty red hair, but you couldn't get afire now 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 first
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
easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be
sensible Tying these two
anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him 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


During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's
jaw-bone tiller had several 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 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

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 practicable, was once more
given to the helmsman

In compliance with the standing order of his commander--to report
immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four 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 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 thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels Starbuck was an honest,
upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw
the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with
its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew
it for itself Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances,
strange, that I should shake so now 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
dead 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
old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom
with him?--Yes, it would make him the wilful 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 I can't withstand thee, then, old
man Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is
all thou breathest Great God forbid!--But is there no other way? no
lawful 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--Oh
Mary! Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death, old 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 main topsails
are reefed and set; she heads her course"

"Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"

Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's
tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream
to speak 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

But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew,
the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it! It has happened
before

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
compasses, the old 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

For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries Besides, the old
man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily
practicable, 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 true as any 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 same time, and frequently more for form's sake than
anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the
course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of
progression every hour 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 frantic
oath about the level log and line The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman

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"

"'Twill hold, old gentleman 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 In
turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely Haul in here, Tahitian;
reel up, Manxman
Let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here, fisherman"

"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm 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 "Ah, now, had poor 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 Lo! ye believers in
gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods
oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not
what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude Come!
I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
Emperor's!"

"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman

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 rocky islets; the watch--then headed
by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively wild 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
Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest mariner of all--declared that the wild
thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men
in the sea

Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great 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
only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a
very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their
peculiar 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 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 blue of the
sea

And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out
for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own peculiar ground; that man
was swallowed up in the deep But again the old Manxman said nay 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 It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs I know an old woman of
sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once
I'll have me--let's see--how many in the ship's company, all told? But
I've forgotten Oh, look, sir! Beware the
hatchway!"

"Thank ye, man Seems to me some sort of
Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made
the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life

"Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the old 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 After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat--the swiftest
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 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 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 own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall
be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely
partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern God bless ye, man, and may I
forgive myself, but I must go"

"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
fidelity of man!--and a black! and crazy!--but methinks like-cures-like
applies to him too; he grows so sane again


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 very 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 successive 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 sufferable for feeble souls to see Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever
conscious that the old man's despot eye was on them But though
his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's
mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never
seemed to speak--one man to the other--unless at long intervals some
passing unmomentous matter made it necessary

And yet, somehow, did Ahab--in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,--Ahab
seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave

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 striking 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
old 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 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 expanded circle commanded at so great a height

When in working with his hands at some lofty 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 strict charge
to some one man who has the special watch of it Because in such a
wilderness of running rigging, whose various 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 natural fatality, if,
unprovided with a constant 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 very man he should select for his watchman;
freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's
hands

Now, the first 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

"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who
being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though
somewhat lower 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 long
hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with
his prize

"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 The firmaments of air and sea were
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and
man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's
chest in his sleep

Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that
stole out of the centre of the serenity around 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 small entrance to any sympathy from the
green country without--oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of
solitary 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
poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the
world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts--away, whole oceans away, from
that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn
the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow--wife?
wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor
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 old 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
better is Ahab now? Behold God! God! God!--crack my heart!--stave my
brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have
I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?
Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is
better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God By
the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass,
man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye

"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 great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy
in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power;
how then can this one small heart beat; this one small 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


That night, in the mid-watch, when the old 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 sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to
some barbarous isle
Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go
flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by,
stand by! Lower me, Mr"

"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 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 Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover
no sign in the sea 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

Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for
an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of
a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his
mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into
the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock

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, furious with
this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized
the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from
its gripe With straining eyes, then, they remained on
the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old
man's head--Help me, man; I wish to stand 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 last 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
At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh
troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old 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 valiant 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"

"Omen? omen?--the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
give an old 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 golden robe was rustling Stubb, send a fresh 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


At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh For such is the
wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence
acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders;
that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they
will, under certain 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 further 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 sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
pilot's coast is to him And as the
mighty iron Leviathan of the modern 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 collateral subtile
matters touching the chase of whales

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
other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and
directed by the long 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 fatal
goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to In those moments, the torn, enraged
waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his
act of defiance

"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 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 other cry but his to shreds 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 fast again

While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after
the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while
aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty 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 old 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 invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly
from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad 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 Nor white whale,
nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
inaccessible being"

"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"

The old man's hinted thought was true
The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,--d'ye see it?--the forged
iron, men, the white whale's--no, no, no,--blistered fool! this hand did
dart it!--'tis in the fish!--Aloft there! Keep him nailed--Quick!--all
hands to the rigging of the boats--collect the oars--harpooneers!
the irons, the irons!--hoist the royals higher--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 good angels mobbing thee with warnings:--

"What more wouldst thou have?--Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish
till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom
of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh,
oh,--Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"

"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 Ahab is for ever Ahab, man Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered
lance; propped up on a lonely foot


The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, 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 Here's food for thought, had
Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels;
THAT'S tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity 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 The sails shake! Stand over that
helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down
No such green weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the difference now
between man's old age and matter's Aye, aye,
like many more thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee;
but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short I am old;--shake hands with me, man

"Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble heart--go not--go not!--see, it's a
brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"

"Lower away!"--cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him 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 old 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
downward 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 profoundest
silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the
opposing bow As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the
precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its
effects--these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of
them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing
wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly
dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming 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!--'tis 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
larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing
prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam

"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 Steady! helmsman, steady Retribution, swift vengeance,
eternal 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 Next instant, the
heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty
tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
depths

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 last day the three
men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern





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woman in sources/moby_dick.txt

 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 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 prodigious black pots too! Are these last 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 Never did
any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as
everybody called her Nor can any son of mortal
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 horrible
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
Harry--(a woman's pinny hand,--the man's wife, I'll wager)--Aye--Mr And
in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with
the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her
progeny It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs I know an old woman of
sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once The firmaments of air and sea were
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and
man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's
chest in his sleep

"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