Public Domain Tales: Moby-Dick: Book Three

Public Domain Tales: Moby-Dick: Book Three is the forty-first book in the Public Domain Tales series.
49. The Hyena
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. However, 
nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all 
creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how 
knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for 
small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, 
and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side 
bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am 
speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very 
midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most 
momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of 
whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now 
regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object. 
“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. 
“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now 
calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all 
whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. 
I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the 
height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.”
“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by; “you are 
experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in 
this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost 
into death’s jaws?”
“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I should like to see a boat’s 
crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint 
for squint, mind that!”
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the entire case. 
Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on 
the deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the 
superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of 
him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his 
impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; 
considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to 
Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that 
Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering 
that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in what 
a devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I 
162
thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, 
“come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.” 
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and 
testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the 
fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was 
concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my 
heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived 
after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case 
might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round 
me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the 
bars of a snug family vault. 
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes a cool, 
collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost. 
163
50. Ahab’s Boat And Crew. Fedallah
“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg you would not catch 
me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful 
old man!” 
“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If his leg were off at the 
hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and 
good part of the other left, you know.” 
“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.” 
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the paramount 
importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain to 
jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with 
tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of 
the fight. 
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with two legs man 
is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always 
under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every 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. Therefore he had not solicited 
a boat’s crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless 
he had taken private measures of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco’s published 
discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while 
out of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the whaleboats for 
service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the 
matter of making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare 
boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is 
running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was observed in him, and 
particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if 
to make it better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he 
evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the 
horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the 
whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in 
the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little 
here and straightened it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and 
curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative 
heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had 
already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition 
did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew being assigned to that 
boat. 
164
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a 
whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of 
strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these 
floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway 
creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whale-boats, 
canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the 
side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any 
unsubduable excitement in the forecastle. 
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their 
place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair�turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly 
world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with 
Ahab’s 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. But one cannot 
sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. 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. 
165
51. The Spirit-Spout
Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four 
several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), 
being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery 
locality, southerly from St. Helena. 
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all 
the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what 
seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in 
advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed 
some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of 
these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out 
there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were 
seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may 
think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such 
unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his 
uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, 
after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, 
every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, 
and hailed the mortal crew. “There she blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could 
not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most 
unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every 
soul on board instinctively desired a lowering. 
Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t’gallant sails and 
royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The 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. And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you 
would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg 
made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. 
On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from 
every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. 
Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time. 
This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the 
same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail 
to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after 
night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or 
starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; 
and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in 
our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on. 
Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the 
preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there 
wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however 
remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast 
166
by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of 
peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in 
order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most 
savage seas.
These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the 
contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought 
there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so 
wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed 
vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow. 
But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around us, and we 
rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod 
sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of 
silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went 
away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before. 
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick 
in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of 
these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the 
hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to 
desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. 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. 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.
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. In tempestuous times like these, after 
everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await 
the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg 
inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for 
hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or 
snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the 
forward part of the ship by the 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. On the 
167
table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents which have previously 
been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand. Though the body was 
erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of 
the tell-tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling.6F
7
 
Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly 
eyest thy purpose. 
7 The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the compass at the helm, the Captain, while 
below, can inform himself of the course of the ship.
168
52. The Albatross
South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground for Right 
Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, 
from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a 
tyro in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home. 
As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded 
walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of 
reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred 
over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long�bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn 
and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron 
hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when 
the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other 
that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, 
those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our 
own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below. 
“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his 
trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising 
amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still 
increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were 
evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention of the White 
Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he 
would have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But 
taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her 
aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—
“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future 
letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address 
them to——” 
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in accordance with 
their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for some days before had been 
placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged 
themselves fore and aft with the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his continual 
voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, 
the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings. 
“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed 
but 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.
169
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new 
distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King 
Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we 
dream of, or in 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.
170
53. The Gam
The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had spoken was this: 
the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not been the case, he would not after 
all, perhaps, have boarded her—judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions—if 
so it had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer to the 
question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not to consort, even for five 
minutes, with any stranger captain, except he could contribute some of that information he so 
absorbingly sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not something 
said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, 
and especially on a common cruising-ground. 
If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally desolate 
Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, 
these twain, for the life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a 
moment to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting in 
concert: then, how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury 
Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth—off lone 
Fanning’s Island, or the far away King’s Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under 
such circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into still closer, 
more friendly and sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of course, 
in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains, officers, and not a few of the 
men are personally known to each other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic 
things to talk about. 
For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on board; at any rate, she 
will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a year or two later than the last one on her 
blurred and thumb-worn files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would 
receive the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be 
destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this will hold true 
concerning whaling vessels crossing each other’s track on the cruising-ground itself, even 
though they are equally long absent from home. For one of them may have received a transfer 
of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for 
the people of the ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and 
have an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors, but 
likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually 
shared privations and perils. 
Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so long as both 
parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, 
from the small number of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when 
they do occur there is too 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. 
Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the 
American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, 
as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really 
consist, it would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more 
whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless little foible in the 
English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably, because 
he knows that he has a few foibles himself.
171
So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers have most reason to be 
sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the 
mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, 
mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all the 
time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when 
they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, 
such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will 
and brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a 
prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, 
when they chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is—“How many skulls?”—
the same way that whalers hail—“How many barrels?” And that question once answered, 
pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don’t like to 
see overmuch of each other’s villanous likenesses. 
But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler! 
What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She 
has a “Gam”, a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name 
even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff 
about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers”, and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all 
Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish 
such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. 
Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs 
has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at 
the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that 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. 
But what is a Gam? you might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns 
of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah 
Webster’s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many 
years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly it 
needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me 
learnedly define it. 
GAM. NOUN—A social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising�ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews: the two captains 
remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.
There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here. All professions 
have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, 
or slave ship, when the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern 
sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a 
pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no 
seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling 
captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs. 
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. And 
often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on 
him from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the importance of 
sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is this any very easy matter; for in his rear 
172
is the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the 
after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus completely wedged before 
and behind, and can only expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but 
a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of 
foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two 
poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the 
world’s riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying 
himself the 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. 
173
54. The Town-Ho’s Story
(As told at the Golden Inn.) 
The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some 
noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers than in any other part. 
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the 
Town-Ho,7F
8
 was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short 
gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the 
White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which 
seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of 
those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter 
circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret 
part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. 
For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was 
the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, 
communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secresy, but the following night 
Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was 
wakened he could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this 
thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such 
a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret 
among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’s main-mast. Interweaving in 
its proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of 
this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record. 
For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a 
lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled 
piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were 
on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put, and 
which are duly answered at the time.
“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you, 
gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not 
very many days’ sail westward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere 
to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily 
usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a 
sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having some unusual reason for 
believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse 
to quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they 
could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy 
weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and 
easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet 
undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, 
making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull 
hove out and repaired.
8 The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the 
famous Gallipagos terrapin.
174
“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance favored, he did not 
at all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and 
being periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship 
free; never mind if the leak should double on her. 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. 
“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your courtesy—may be, you shall 
soon hear further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, 
well-nigh as 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. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, 
Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as 
any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone 
Nantucket beach, to nurse at his 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. At all events, he had 
proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, 
you shall hear. 
“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, 
that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at 
the pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, 
for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, 
sleepy night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the 
probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of 
175
all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to 
the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump�handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a 
tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when 
a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless 
latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious. 
“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found gaining once 
more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by several of her company; 
especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted 
home anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little 
of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own 
person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently 
imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, 
some of the seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in her. So 
when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small 
gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually 
overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen—that 
bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee 
scupper-holes. 
“Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery 
or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them 
to be very significantly his 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. But Radney, the 
mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, 
and Steelkilt knew it.
“Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the Lakeman 
affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings. 
“‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye, and let’s have a 
taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I tell ye what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for 
it! he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish 
only began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file�fish, and what not; and the whole posse of ’em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at 
the bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him to jump 
overboard and scatter ’em. They’re playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he’s a 
simple old soul,—Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in 
looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.’ 
“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney, pretending not to have 
heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’ 
“‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys, lively, now!’ And with that 
the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that 
peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s utmost 
energies.
176
“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward all panting, 
and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the 
profuse sweat from his brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed 
Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it 
happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and 
sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent 
upon allowing a pig to run at large. 
“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all 
times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in 
the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea�usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly 
drown without first washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the 
prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the 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. I mention all these particulars so that 
you may understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men. 
“But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting 
and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a 
whale-ship will understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully 
comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment, and as 
he steadfastly looked into the mate’s malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks 
heaped up in him and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively 
saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in 
any already ireful being—a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even 
when aggrieved—this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
“Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily exhaustion he was 
temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping the deck was not his business, and he 
would not do it. And then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the 
customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or nothing all day. 
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. 
“Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily followed by the mate with 
his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that 
his forbearance had not the 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: 
177
“‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself.’ 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. Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye with the 
unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and 
creepingly drawing it back, told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he 
(Steelkilt) would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by 
the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw of the 
mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale. 
“Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays leading far aloft to where 
two of his comrades were standing their mast-heads. They were both Canallers. 
“‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro, ‘We have seen many whale-ships in our harbors, but never 
heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are they?’ 
“‘Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must have heard 
of it.’ 
“‘Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, we know but 
little of your vigorous North.’ 
“‘Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha’s very fine; and ere proceeding further I 
will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story.’ 
“For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of the state of New 
York; through 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. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where 
you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing 
lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan 
freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most 
abound in holiest vicinities. 
“‘Is that a friar passing?’ said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded plazza, with 
humorous concern. 
“‘Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in Lima,’ laughed Don 
Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’ 
“‘A moment! Pardon!’ cried another of the company. ‘In the name of all us Limeese, I but 
desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not 
substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and 
look surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast—“Corrupt as Lima.” It but bears 
out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open—and 
“Corrupt as Lima.” So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, 
St. Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.’ 
“Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine dramatic 
hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days 
along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked 
Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is 
178
dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily�ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages 
through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once 
a vagabond on his 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 see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon his silvery ruffles. 
‘No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North 
the generations were cold and holy as the hills.—But the story.’ 
“I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the back-stay. Hardly had he done so, when 
he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him 
to the deck. But sliding down the ropes like 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. At intervals, 
he ran close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart of it with 
his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes 
were too much for them all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily 
slewing about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians 
entrenched themselves behind the barricade.”
“‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing them with a pistol in each 
hand, just brought to him by the steward. ‘Come out of that, ye cut-throats!’ 
“Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the worst the pistols 
could do; but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt’s) death would be 
the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart lest this might 
prove but too 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. 
“‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise;—to your duty! Do you want to sink the ship, by 
knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!’ and he once more raised a pistol.
“‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear 
not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say ye, men?’ turning to his comrades. A fierce 
cheer was their response.
“The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on the Captain, and 
jerking out such sentences as these:—‘It’s not our fault; we didn’t want it; I told him to take 
his hammer away; it was boy’s business; he might have known me before this; I told him not 
to prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw; ain’t those 
mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. 
179
Captain, by God, look to yourself; say the word; don’t be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to 
turn to; treat us decently, and we’re your men; but we won’t be flogged.’ 
“‘Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!’ 
“‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him, ‘there are a few of us 
here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well 
know, sir, we can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want a row; 
it’s not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won’t be 
flogged.’ 
“‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain. 
“Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—‘I tell you what it is now, Captain, 
rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye 
unless ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging us, we won’t do a hand’s 
turn.’ 
“‘Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there till ye’re sick of it. Down ye 
go.’ 
“‘Shall we?’ cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it; but at length, in 
obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, 
like bears into a cave.
“As the Lakeman’s bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain and his posse leaped 
the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands 
upon it, and loudly called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock, belonging to the 
companion-way. Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something down the 
crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them—ten in number—leaving on deck some 
twenty or more, who thus far had remained neutral. 
“All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and aft, especially about 
the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which last place it was feared the insurgents might 
emerge, after breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in 
peace; the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and 
clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally resounded through the ship. 
“At sunrise the captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned the prisoners to 
work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then lowered down to them, and a couple of 
handfuls of biscuit were tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing 
it, the Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this was repeated; 
but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the 
customary summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, 
saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united 
perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion. 
Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to 
him a terrific hint to stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth 
morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms below 
that sought to restrain them. Only three were left. 
“‘Better turn to, now?’ said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
“‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried Steelkilt. 
“‘Oh! certainly,’ said the Captain and the key clicked. 
180
“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 a muck from the bowsprit to the 
taffrail; and if by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he 
would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the last night he should 
spend in that den. But the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other two; they 
swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a 
surrender. And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the 
time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely objected, reserving that 
priority for himself; particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in 
the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a 
time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants must come out. 
“Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own separate soul had suddenly 
lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking 
out, in order to be the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and thereby 
secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit. But when Steelkilt made 
known his determination still to lead them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle 
chemistry of villany, mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell 
into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences; and bound the 
sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight. 
“Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and all his armed mates 
and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, 
bound hand and foot, the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his 
perfidious allies, who at once claimed the honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe 
for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side 
by side, were seized up into the mizen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they 
hung till morning. ‘Damn ye,’ cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them, ‘the vultures 
would not touch ye, ye villains!’ 
“At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled from those who 
had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a 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. 
“‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues,’ turning to the three men in the rigging—‘for you, I mean 
to mince ye up for the try-pots;’ and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the 
backs of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads sideways, as 
the two crucified thieves are drawn.
“‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he cried, at last; ‘but there is still rope enough left for you, 
my fine bantam, that wouldn’t give up. Take that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he 
can say for himself.’
“For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his cramped jaws, and 
then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss, ‘What I say is this—and mind it 
well—if you flog me, I murder you!’ 
“‘Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me’—and the Captain drew off with the rope to strike. 
181
“‘Best not,’ hissed the Lakeman. 
“‘But I must,’—and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke. 
“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. Ever since the blow, he had lain in his berth; 
but that morning, hearing the tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched 
the whole scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but mumbling 
something about his being willing and able to do what the captain dared not attempt, he 
snatched the rope and advanced to his pinioned foe. 
“‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman.
“‘So I am, but take that.’ The mate was in the very act of striking, when another hiss stayed 
his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing no more, made good his word, spite of 
Steelkilt’s threat, whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down, all 
hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as 
before.
“Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor was heard in the 
forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they 
durst not consort with the crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at 
their own instance they were put down in the ship’s run for salvation. Still, no sign of mutiny 
reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt’s instigation, 
they had resolved to maintain the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when 
the ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest end to the 
voyage, they all agreed to another thing—namely, not to sing out for whales, in case any 
should be discovered. For, spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still 
maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that 
moment, as on the day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney the mate was 
quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in 
death the vital jaw of the whale.
“But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of passiveness in their 
conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all was over) concerning his 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. Upon this, and one or two other 
circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.
“During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the bulwarks of the quarter�deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the boat which was hoisted up there, a little 
above the ship’s side. In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a 
considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea. 
Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick at the helm would come round at 
two o’clock, in the morning of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his 
leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his watches below. 
“‘What are you making there?’ said a shipmate.
“‘What do you think? what does it look like?’ 
182
“‘Like a lanyard for your bag; but it’s an odd one, seems to me.’ 
“‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the Lakeman, holding it at arm’s length before him; ‘but I think it 
will answer. Shipmate, I haven’t enough twine,—have you any?’ 
“But there was none in the forecastle.
“‘Then I must get some from old Rad;’ and he rose to go aft. 
“‘You don’t mean to go a begging to him!’ said a sailor.
“‘Why not? Do you think he won’t do me a turn, when it’s to help himself in the end, 
shipmate?’ and going to the mate, he looked at him quietly, and asked him for some twine to 
mend his hammock. It was given him—neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the 
next night an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman’s monkey 
jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his 
trick at the silent helm—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.
“But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he had planned. 
Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, 
Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he 
would have done. 
“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.
“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. 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.’ 
“‘How? how!’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding. 
“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, Sirs.’ 
“‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend looks faint;—fill up his 
empty glass!’ 
“No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so suddenly perceiving 
the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship—forgetful of the compact among the crew—in 
the excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted his 
voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had been plainly beheld from the 
three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy. ‘The White Whale—the White Whale!’ was 
the cry from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumors, were all 
anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, and 
with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling 
sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange 
fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world 
itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when 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. Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the 
mate’s got the start; and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he 
strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney 
183
sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged 
cry was, to beach him on the whale’s topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him 
up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the 
boat struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate. That 
instant, as he fell on the whale’s slippery back, the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the 
swell, while Radney was tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck 
out through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to 
remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden 
maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged 
headlong again, and went down. 
“Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the line, so as to 
drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a 
sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He cut it; 
and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of 
Radney’s red woollen shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave 
chase again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared. 
“In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary place—where no civilized 
creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremast-men 
deliberately deserted among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double 
war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor. 
“The ship’s company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called upon the Islanders to 
assist him in the laborious business of heaving down the ship to stop the leak. 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. 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. 
“On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to have touched at a 
low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon 
the voice of Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain 
presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman 
laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would 
bury him in bubbles and foam. 
“‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain. 
“‘Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?’ demanded Steelkilt; ‘no lies.’ 
“‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’ 
“‘Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.’ With that he leaped from the 
canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with the captain. 
“‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As soon as Steelkilt 
leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder island, and remain there six days. If I do not, 
may lightnings strike me!’
“‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping into the sea, he swam 
back to his comrades.
184
“Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots of the cocoa-nut trees, 
Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. 
There, luck befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially 
in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They embarked; and so for 
ever got the start of their former captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal 
retribution. 
“Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and the captain was 
forced to enlist some of the more civilized Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. 
Chartering a small native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all right 
there, again resumed his cruisings. 
“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of Nantucket, the widow 
of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the 
awful white whale that destroyed him. * * * * 
“‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, quietly. 
“‘I am, Don.’ 
“‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this story is in substance 
really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear 
with me if I seem to press.’
“‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian’s suit,’ cried the 
company, with exceeding interest. 
“‘Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?’ 
“‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know a worthy priest near by, who will quickly procure 
one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised? this may grow too serious.’ 
“‘Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?’ 
“‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fés in Lima now,’ said one of the company to another: ‘I fear 
our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. 
I see no need for this.’ 
“‘Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that you will be 
particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists you can.’ 
“‘This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,’ said Don Sebastian, gravely, returning 
with a tall and solemn figure.
“‘Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and hold the Holy 
Book before me that I may touch it.’ 
“‘So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in substance 
and its great items, true. I know it to be true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew 
the crew; I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.’”
185
55. Of The Monstrous Pictures Of Whales
I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form 
of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his 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. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale 
all wrong. 
It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among the 
oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever since those inventive but 
unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on 
shields, medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like 
Saladin’s, and a helmeted head like St. George’s; ever since then has something of the same 
sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many 
scientific presentations of him.
Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale’s, is to 
be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in 
the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every 
conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into 
being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been 
there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the 
wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the 
Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail 
of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of 
an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale’s majestic flukes.
But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter’s portrait of this fish; for 
he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing 
Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange 
creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own “Perseus 
Descending,” make out one whit better. The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster 
undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its 
back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for 
the Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the 
Prodromus whales of the old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale, as depicted in the prints of 
old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said of these? As for the book-binder’s 
whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor—as stamped and 
gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old and new—that is a very 
picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique 
vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder’s fish 
an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended when the device was first introduced. It was 
introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival 
of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins were 
popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan.
In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with 
very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets d’eau, hot springs and 
186
cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title�page of the original edition of the “Advancement of Learning” you will find some curious 
whales.
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of leviathan 
purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In old Harris’s collection 
of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of 
voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the 
Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.” In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts 
of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living 
backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with 
perpendicular flukes. 
Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the 
English navy, entitled “A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of 
extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.” In this book is an outline purporting to be a 
“Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of 
Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.” I doubt not the captain had this veracious 
picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say that 
it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm 
whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant 
captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye! 
Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the young 
and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that popular work 
“Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of 
an alleged “whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly 
whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is 
enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for 
genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys. 
Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, a great naturalist, published a 
scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of the different species of the 
Leviathan. All these are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland 
whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as touching 
that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature. 
But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific 
Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of 
Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that 
picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. 
In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, 
he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived 
that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, 
Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort 
of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us. 
As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers, what 
shall be said of them? They are generally Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and 
very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: 
their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint. 
But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. 
Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these 
187
are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly 
represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants 
have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for 
his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in 
unfathomable waters; and 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. And, not to 
speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a 
full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales 
hoisted to a ship’s deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, 
that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch. 
But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may 
be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about 
this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy 
Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, 
correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s 
other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any 
leviathan’s articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale 
bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the 
chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as 
in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the 
side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus 
only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little 
finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in 
an artificial covering. “However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us,” said 
humorous Stubb one day, “he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens.” 
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the 
great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. 
True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any 
very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely 
what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable 
idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small 
risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be 
too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan. 
188
56. Of The Less Erroneous Pictures Of Whales, 
And The True Pictures Of Whaling Scenes
In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon 
those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both 
ancient and modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, &c. But I pass 
that matter by.
I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett’s, Huggins’s, 
Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been 
referred to. Huggins’s is far better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All 
Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three 
whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking 
Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, 
is admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in 
J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not 
his fault though. 
Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are drawn on too small 
a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is 
a sad deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can 
derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living hunters. 
But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the most correct, 
presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French 
engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they 
represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale 
is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from the profundities of the 
ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The 
prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster’s spine; 
and standing in that prow, for that one 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. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and true. The half�emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons 
obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale in 
contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing 
down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this whale, 
but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a one. 
In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a 
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. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea 
candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And 
all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of 
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. Thus, the foreground is all raging 
commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, 
189
the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a 
conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into 
his spout-hole. 
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was either practically 
conversant with his subject, or else marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. 
The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings in Europe, and 
where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that 
triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the 
consecutive great battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, 
and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? 
Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.
The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be 
peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes. With 
not one tenth of England’s experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the 
Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only finished sketches at 
all capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and 
American whale draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline 
of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of effect is 
concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the 
justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving us a 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. I mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager 
(I honor him for a veteran), but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to 
have procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the 
Peace.
In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other French engravings 
worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself “H. Durand.” One of them, though not 
precisely adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It 
is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a 
calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of 
the palms in the background, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very 
fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their 
few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to 
upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale 
alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a 
boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving chase to whales in the 
distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast 
in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands half-erect out of the 
water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is 
going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up 
with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.
190
Category:Books