Public Domain Tales: Moby-Dick: Book Four

**Public Domain Tales: Moby-Dick: Book Four** is the forty-second book in the Public Domain Tales series.

57. Of Whales In Paint; In Teeth; In Wood; In
Sheet-Iron; In Stone; In Mountains; In Stars
On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar
(or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic
scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats
(presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the
jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that
picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has
now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any
rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings.
But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman
make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.
Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will
come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen
themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone,
and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious
contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure.
Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with
that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the
way of a mariner’s fancy.
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in
which God placed him, i. e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a
savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage; owning no allegiance but to the King of the
Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.
Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful
patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity
and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For,
with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net�work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application.
As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous
patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you
a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of
design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness,
as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.
Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea
war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are
done with much accuracy.
At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for
knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be
best. But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of
some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks;
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but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with
“Hands off!” you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie
strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the
petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against
them in a surf of green surges.
Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by
amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing
glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a
thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a
sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your
first stand-point, else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise,
previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which
still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera
chronicled them.
Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the
starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the
Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I
chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first
defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis,
and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the
Flying Fish.
With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could
mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their
countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!
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58. Brit
Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute,
yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it
undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and
golden wheat.
On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a
Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which,
adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that
manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip.
As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through
the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy,
cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.8F
9

But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all reminded one of
mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused and were stationary for a
while, their vast black forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And
as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the
plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare,
blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this
species of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their immense
magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can
possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.
Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with the same
feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old naturalists have maintained that
all creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of
the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example, does the
ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The
accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded
with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an
everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to
discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal
disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of
those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that
however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom,
the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make;
nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of
the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed
a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same
9 That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does not bear that name as the Banks of
Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable
meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, where the Right
Whale is often chased.
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ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet
subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon the other?
Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his company
the live ground opened and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but
in precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own
offspring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the
creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays
her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them
there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it.
Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean
overruns the globe.
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water,
unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.
Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal
cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war
since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them
both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one
insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known
life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
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59. Squid
Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way north-eastward
towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity
her three tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a
plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet would be seen.
But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea,
however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the
waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered
waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a
strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling
itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the
hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose,
and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo.
Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that
startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled out—“There! there again! there she
breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”
Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush to the
boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed
far behind in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the
direction indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had gradually worked upon
Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first
sight of the particular whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed
him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass,
than with a quick intensity he instantly gave orders for lowering.
The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards
their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its
reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting
for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon
which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in
length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long
arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly
to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no
conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an
unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated
waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby
Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
“The great live squid, which they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their
ports to tell of it.”
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But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as silently
following.
Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this
object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far
to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare
it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most
vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to
the sperm whale his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above
water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole
food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of
what, precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are
supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty
and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily
clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is
supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.
There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may
ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as
alternately rising and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two
correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.
By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious creature, here spoken
of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects
it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.
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60. The Line
With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better
understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical,
sometimes horrible whale-line.
The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly vapored with tar, not
impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes
the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to
the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too much stiffen the
whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are
beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength,
however much it may give it compactness and gloss.
Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp
as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more
soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an æsthetics in all things), is much more
handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of
Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.
The whale line is only two thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it
so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of
one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three
tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred
fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm�pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded
“sheaves,” or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the “heart,” or
minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling
would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost
precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an
entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards
through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles
and twists.
In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line being continuously coiled
in both tubs. There is some advantage in this; because these twin-tubs being so small they fit
more readily into the boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly
three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft
whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like
critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a
concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub, the
boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the
whales.
Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming
up from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely
disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts.
First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in
case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line
originally attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a
mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at
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hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety’s
sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale
then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does,
he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into
the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again.
Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and
passing round the logger-head there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat,
resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist
in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales,
to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin
or skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs
in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or
twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way
to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp—the rope which
is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp
goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.
Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing
around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions;
so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest
snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time,
seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink
him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions
be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that
makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit—strange
thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and
brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch
white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the six
burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of
death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.
Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling
disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of this man or that man being taken
out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the
boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full
play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you
cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and
you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain
self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being
made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce
you out.
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is
perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and
envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal
powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently
serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play—this is a thing which
carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more?
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is
only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle,
ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you
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would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire
with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
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61. Stubb Kills A Whale
If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a
different object.
“When you see him ’quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted
boat, “then you quick see him ’parm whale.”
The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, the
Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this
part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a
lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other
vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore
ground off Peru.
It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the
slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No
resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul
went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after
the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and
mizen mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from
the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering
helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the
sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the
shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And
lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water
like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in
the sun’s rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon
tranquilly spouting his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of
a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter’s
wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more
than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from
aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the
sparkling brine into the air.
“Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he dashed the helm
down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the boats were
down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity,
and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed,
Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So
seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled
along; the calm not admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in
chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of
sight like a tower swallowed up.
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“There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb’s
producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the full
interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the
smoker’s boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honor
of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of his
pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped,
and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the
assault.
Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he was going head
out; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he brewed.9F
10
“Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take plenty of time—but start her; start
her like thunder-claps, that’s all,” cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start
her, now; give ’em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy—start her,
all; but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the word—easy, easy—only start her like grim
death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys—
that’s all. Start her!”
“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old war-whoop to the
skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one
tremendous leading stroke which the eager Indian gave.
But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee-hee! Kee-hee!” yelled
Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage.
“Ka-la! Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier’s
steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his
place in the van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from
his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard—
“Stand up, Tashtego!—give it to him!” The harpoon was hurled. “Stern all!” The oarsmen
backed water; the same moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their
wrists. It was the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional
turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a
hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the
line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it
blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb’s hands, from which the hand-cloths,
or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped. It was
like holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time
striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
“Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the tub) who,
snatching off his hat, dashed the sea-water into it.10F
11 More turns were taken, so that the line
began holding its place. The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins.
10 It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire interior of the sperm whale’s
enormous head consists. Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So
that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is
the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part,
that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish
galliot into a sharp-pointed New York pilot-boat. 11 Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop
was used to dash the running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for
that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.
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Stubb and Tashtego here changed places—stem for stern—a staggering business truly in that
rocking commotion.
From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat, and from its
now being more tight than a harpstring, you would have thought the craft had two keels—one
cleaving the water, the other the air—as the boat churned on through both opposing elements
at once. A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and,
at the slightest motion from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft
canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and
main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at
the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole
Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale
somewhat slackened his flight.
“Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round towards the whale, all
hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging
up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into
the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the
whale’s horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another fling.
The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented
body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their
wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into
every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet after jet
of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after
puff from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked
lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows
against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.
“Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath.
“Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along the fish’s flank. When reaching far over the
bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully
churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale
might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But
that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting
from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” the monster horribly wallowed
in his blood, over-wrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled
craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied
twilight into the clear air of the day.
And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to
side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized
respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red
wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless
flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.
“Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the
dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he
had made.
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62. The Dart
A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from the ship,
with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale�fastener pulling the foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a
strong, nervous arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long dart,
the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however
prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to
the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not
only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to
keep shouting at the top of one’s compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half
started—what that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very
heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state,
then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry—
“Stand up, and give it to him!” He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his
centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength may remain,
he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen
in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so
many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them
actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are
absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a
losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out
of his body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!
Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale
starts to run, the boat-header and harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the
imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the
headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat.
Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary. The
headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the
lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances
obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in
the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced
me that in the vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much
the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused
them.
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their
feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
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63. The Crotch
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow
the chapters.
The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It is a notched stick
of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the
starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity
of the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the
weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as a
backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing
in the crotch, respectively called the first and second irons.
But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the line; the object
being this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly after the other into the same whale; so
that if, in the coming drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a
doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent,
convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it becomes impossible for the
harpooneer, however lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him.
Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line, and the line is running,
hence that weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and
somewhere; else the most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water,
it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter)
making this feat, in most instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always
unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties.
Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth
becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale,
entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor,
in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse.
Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one unusually strong,
active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand
concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied with several
harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be ineffectually darted without recovery.
All these particulars are faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several most
important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.
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64. Stubb’s Supper
Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, forming a
tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod.
And now, as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs
and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it
seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished
of the enormousness of the mass we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or
whatever they call it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky
freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged
along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.
Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s main-rigging dimly guided
our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the
bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for
securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the
cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.
Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his customary
activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or
impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded
him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to
his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you
would have thought from the sound on the Pequod’s decks, that all hands were preparing to
cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling
out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be
moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its
black hull close to the vessel’s, and seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured
the spars and rigging aloft, the two—ship and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal
bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.11F
12
If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his
second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement.
Such an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly
resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all
this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was
somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.
“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his
small!”
12 A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable hold which the ship has upon the
whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively
heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the
surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But this
difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a
weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made
to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow
suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of
junction with its broad flukes or lobes.
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Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general thing, and according
to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least
before realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these
Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale
designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.
About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm oil,
Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a
sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale’s flesh that night. Mingling their
mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the
dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were
often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the
sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them)
wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out
huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the
shark seems all but miraculous. How, at such an apparently unassailable surface, they
contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of
all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by
a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen
longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is
being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while
the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat
with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths,
are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to
turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say,
a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable
outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be
handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and
though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and
occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there
no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in
gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale�ship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety
of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so nigh him,
no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips.
“Cook, cook!—where’s that old Fleece?” he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as
if to form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the
dish, as if stabbing with his lance; “cook, you cook!—sail this way, cook!”
The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously routed from his warm
hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his galley, for, like many
old blacks, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well
scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping
along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of
straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of
command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with both
hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still
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further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into
play.
“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, “don’t you think this
steak is rather overdone? You’ve been beating this steak too much, cook; it’s too tender.
Don’t I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks now
over the side, don’t you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up!
Cook, go and talk to ’em; tell ’em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in
moderation, but they must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
deliver my message. Here, take this lantern,” snatching one from his sideboard; “now then,
go and preach to ’em!”
Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and
then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his
congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the
side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind,
overheard all that was said.
“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. You hear?
Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lip! massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de
hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!”
“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the
shoulder,—“Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way when you’re
preaching. That’s no way to convert sinners, Cook!”
“Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” sullenly turning to go.
“No, Cook; go on, go on.”
“Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—
“Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ’em to it; try that,” and Fleece continued.
“Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat
woraciousness—’top dat dam slappin’ ob de tail! How you tink to hear, ’spose you keep up
such a dam slappin’ and bitin’ dare?”
“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I wont have that swearing. Talk to ’em gentlemanly.”
Once more the sermon proceeded.
“Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can’t be
helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern
de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well
goberned. Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat
whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbour’s mout, I say. Is not one shark dood
right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale
belong to some one else. I know some o’ you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den
de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swallar
wid, but to bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can’t get into de scrouge to help
demselves.”
“Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go on.”
“No use goin’ on; de dam willains will keep a scrougin’ and slappin’ each oder, Massa Stubb;
dey don’t hear one word; no use a-preachin’ to such dam g’uttons as you call ’em, till dare
bellies is full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get em full, dey wont hear you
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den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can’t hear not’ing at all, no
more, for eber and eber.”
“Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece, and I’ll
away to my supper.”
Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his shrill voice, and cried—
“Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam’ bellies till
dey bust—and den die.”
“Now, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; “Stand just where you stood
before, there, over against me, and pay particular attention.”
“All dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the desired position.
“Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; “I shall now go back to the subject of
this steak. In the first place, how old are you, cook?”
“What dat do wid de ’teak,” said the old black, testily.
“Silence! How old are you, cook?”
“’Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
“And have you lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and don’t know yet
how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting another mouthful at the last word, so that that
morsel seemed a continuation of the question. “Where were you born, cook?”
“’Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.”
“Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what country you were born in,
cook?”
“Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried, sharply.
“No, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, cook. You must go home and be
born over again; you don’t know how to cook a whale-steak yet.”
“Bress my soul, if I cook noder one,” he growled, angrily, turning round to depart.
“Come back, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take that bit of steak there, and tell
me if you think that steak cooked as it should be? Take it, I say”—holding the tongs towards
him—“take it, and taste it.”
Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro muttered, “Best
cooked ’teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.”
“Cook,” said Stubb, squaring himself once more; “do you belong to the church?”
“Passed one once in Cape-Down,” said the old man sullenly.
“And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where you doubtless
overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his beloved fellow-creatures, have you,
cook! And yet you come here, and tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?” said
Stubb. “Where do you expect to go to, cook?”
“Go to bed berry soon,” he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
“Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It’s an awful question. Now what’s your
answer?”
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“When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and demeanor,
“he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some bressed angel will come and fetch him.”
“Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him where?”
“Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very
solemnly.
“So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you are dead? But don’t
you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets? Main-top, eh?”
“Didn’t say dat t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks.
“You said up there, didn’t you, and now look yourself, and see where your tongs are pointing.
But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the lubber’s hole, cook; but
no, no, cook, you don’t get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It’s a
ticklish business, but must be done, or else it’s no go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop
your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap
t’other a’top of your heart, when I’m giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?—
that’s your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!—that’s it—now you have it. Hold it there now, and pay
attention.”
“All ’dention,” said the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his
grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time.
“Well then, cook; you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have put it out of
sight as soon as possible; you see that, don’t you? Well, for the future, when you cook
another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not to
spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other;
that done, dish it; d’ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be
sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the
flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go.”
But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear? away you
sail, then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.—Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for
breakfast—don’t forget.”
“Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he ain’t more of shark
dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation
he went to his hammock.
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65. The Whale As A Dish
That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him
by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a
little into the history and philosophy of it.
It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great
delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a
certain cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be
eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of whale. Porpoises,
indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of
billiard balls, and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls.
The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise grant from
the crown.
The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a
noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie
nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men
like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We
all know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil.
Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as
being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who
long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel—that these men actually
lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore after
trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called “fritters;” which,
indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something like old
Amsterdam housewives’ dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable
look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off.
But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his exceeding richness. He is the
great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as
fine eating as the buffalo’s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid
of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent, half�jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a
substitute for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some
other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it is a common
thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there
awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made.
In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the
skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely
resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most
delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is quite a dish among
some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by
continually dining upon calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as
to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon
discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf’s
head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of
reproachfully at him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.
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It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem
to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the
consideration before mentioned: i. e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea,
and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was
regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he
certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat�market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of
dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who
is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean
missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident
Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who
nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is
it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that
roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox
you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a
feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the
Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last
month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.
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66. The Shark Massacre
When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought
alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the
business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon
completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in
all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with
the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an
hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well.
But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all;
because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left
so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning.
In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their
wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up
with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only
seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the
Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked
over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge
cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.
Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when,
accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was
created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and
lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two
mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the
sharks,12F
13 by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But
in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always
hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe.
They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows,
bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the
same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to
meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality
seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life
had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost
took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous
jaw.
“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand
up and down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one
dam Ingin.”
13 The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about the bigness of a man’s spread
hand; and in general shape, corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are
perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as
possible; and when being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to
thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
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67. Cutting In
It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath
breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every
sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the
sea gods.
In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous things comprising a
cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift—this
vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast�head, the strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the hawser-like rope
winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower
block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing
some one hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the side,
Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body
for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad,
semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew
striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When
instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads
of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to
the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the
windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is
heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the
triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first
strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange,
so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing
it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over
and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called
the “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as
fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted
higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then
cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro
as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it
swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.
One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon called a boarding�sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the lower
part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then
hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows.
Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes
a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it
completely in twain; so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called
a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume
their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the
other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right
beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment
sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass
of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering
simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber-room
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gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally,
by way of assuaging the general friction.
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68. The Blanket
I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had
controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My
original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber
is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more
elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature’s skin as being of that
sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a
presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale’s
body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably
dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you
may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling
the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous
to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I
have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I
said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with
fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales
through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That
same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale,
is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak;
for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner
and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.
Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a
very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is
considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three
fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the
enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a
lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of
only three quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.
In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he
presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless
straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But
these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but
seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In
some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving,
but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call
those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word
to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one
Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian
characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper
Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.
This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other
phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back,
and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by
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reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say
that those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of
violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must not a
little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in
the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked
them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.
A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already
been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms,
this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a
real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting
his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to
keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of
a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the north, if unsupplied with his cosy
surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these,
be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators;
creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would
bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his
blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that this great
monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that
he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when
seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen
into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to
know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that
of a Borneo negro in summer.
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the
rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and
model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in
this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like
the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a
temperature of thine own.
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed
like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!
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69. The Funeral
“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale
flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in
bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming
fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless
phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem
square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and
hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and
mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great
mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the
air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped
the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they
most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale
is free.
Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to
scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the
distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the
sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale’s unharming corpse,
with trembling fingers is set down in the log—shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts:
beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep
leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held.
There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your
obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in
the air! There’s orthodoxy!
Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death
his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and
far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
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70. The Sphynx
It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the
leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific
anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves; and
not without reason.
Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the contrary, where
his head and body seem to join, there, in that very place, is the thickest part of him.
Remember, also, that the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening
between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discolored, rolling, and
oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward
circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner,
without so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must
skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical
point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb’s boast, that he
demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?
When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable till the body is
stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately
disposed of. But, with a full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale’s head
embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that,
even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a
Dutch barn in jewellers’ scales.
The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against
the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up
by its native element. And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of
the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side
projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s
waist like the giant Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith.
When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to their
dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck. An intense copper
calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless
leaves upon the sea.
A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin. Taking
a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the
main-chains he took Stubb’s long spade—still remaining there after the whale’s
decapitation—and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other
end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this
head.
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it
seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab,
“which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses;
speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived
the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s
foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot;
where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the
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drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been
where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers
would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from
their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other,
when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates
from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and
his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship
that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast
seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is
thine!”
“Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-masthead.
“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole
thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry upon this deadly calm might
almost convert a better man.—Where away?”
“Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!”
“Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my
breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance
are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning
duplicate in mind.”
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71. The Jeroboam’s Story
Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the
Pequod began to rock.
By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads proved her a whale�ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting by, apparently making a passage to
some other ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what
response would be made.
Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of the American Whale
Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals being collected in a book with the names of
the respective vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale
commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable
distances, and with no small facility.
The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s setting her own; which proved
the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam
under the Pequod’s lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was
being rigged by Starbuck’s order to accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in
question waved his hand from his boat’s stern in token of that proceeding being entirely
unnecessary. It turned out that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that
Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though himself
and boat’s crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an
incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the
timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the
Pequod.
But this did by no means prevent all communication. Preserving an interval of some few
yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam’s boat by the occasional use of its oars
contrived to keep parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this
time it blew very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the sudden
onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some way ahead; but would be soon
skilfully brought to her proper bearings again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions
now and then, a conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not
without still another interruption of a very different sort.
Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even in that wild
whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities. He was a small, short,
youngish man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A
long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping
sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his
eyes.
So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed—“That’s he! that’s he!
the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho’s company told us of!” Stubb here alluded to a
strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time previous
when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account and what was subsequently
learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in question had gained a wonderful ascendency over
almost everybody in the Jeroboam. His story was this:
220
He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he
had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several times descended
from heaven by the way of a trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial,
which he carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder, was
supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had
left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a
steady, common sense exterior and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the
Jeroboam’s whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship’s getting out
of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel
Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto,
whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all
Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he declared these things;—the dark, daring
play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium,
united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with an
atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a man, however, was
not of much practical use in the ship, especially as he refused to work except when he
pleased, the incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that
individual’s intention was to land him in the first convenient port, the archangel forthwith
opened all his seals and vials—devoting the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in
case this intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the
crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel was sent from the
ship, not a man of them would remain. He was therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor
would they permit Gabriel to be any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came
to pass that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all this was,
that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic
had broken out, he carried a higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it,
was at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The
sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in obedience to his
instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such things may seem
incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking
in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power
of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to return to the Pequod.
“I fear not thy epidemic, man,” said Ahab from the bulwarks to Captain Mayhew, who stood
in the boat’s stern; “come on board.”
But now Gabriel started to his feet.
“Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible plague!”
“Gabriel, Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either—” But that instant a headlong
wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech.
“Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back.
“Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!”
“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—” But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by fiends.
Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by
one of those occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the
hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with
rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to warrant.
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When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick;
not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was
mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.
It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a whale-ship, her
people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made.
Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking
the White Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing
the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving
the Bible. But when, some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the
mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned with ardor to encounter him; and the captain
himself being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel’s
denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat.
With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful
onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the
main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies
of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate,
was standing up in his boat’s bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting
his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance,
lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking
the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious
life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at
the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any
oarsman’s head; but the mate for ever sank.
It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this
kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is
thus annihilated; oftener the boat’s bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the
headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But strangest of all is the
circumstance, that in more instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single
mark of violence is discernible; the man being stark dead.
The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the ship.
Raising a piercing shriek—“The vial! the vial!” Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew
from the further hunting of the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added
influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically fore-announced it,
instead of only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have
chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror
to the ship.
Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him, that the stranger
captain could not forbear inquiring whether he intended to hunt the White Whale, if
opportunity should offer. To which Ahab answered—“Aye.” Straightway, then, Gabriel once
more started to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with
downward pointed finger—“Think, think of the blasphemer—dead, and down there!—
beware of the blasphemer’s end!”
Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I have just bethought me of my
letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the
bag.”
Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose delivery to
the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering
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them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only
received after attaining an age of two or three years or more.
Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered
with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin.
Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.
“Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give it me, man. Aye, aye it’s but a dim scrawl;—what’s
this?” As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife
slightly split the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without its
coming any closer to the ship.
Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, “Mr. Har—yes, Mr. Harry—(a woman’s pinny
hand,—the man’s wife, I’ll wager)—Aye—Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;—why it’s
Macey, and he’s dead!”
“Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but let me have it.”
“Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou art soon going that way.”
“Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive it;” and
taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached
it over towards the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the
boat drifted a little towards the ship’s stern; so that, as if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged
along with Gabriel’s eager hand. He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and
impaling the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab’s feet. Then
Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the
mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.
As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many
strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.
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72. The Monkey-Rope
In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running
backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands
are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time
everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the
description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon
first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original
hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that
same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg,
whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special purpose
referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain
on the whale till the whole tensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it
observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So
down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about,
half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath
him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume—a shirt and
socks—in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a
better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen.
Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the
second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard�scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a
dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down
there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a
strong strip of canvas belted round his waist.
It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must
be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and
fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were
wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honour
demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an
elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor
could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.
So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly
watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now
merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and
that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and
death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed
equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked
him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still
further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every
mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion
with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by
mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding
caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But
handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came
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very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the
management of one end of it.13F
14
I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the ship—
where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying of both. But this
was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made
upon them during the night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before
pent blood which began to flow from the carcass—the rabid creatures swarmed round it like
bees in a beehive.
And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his
floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a
dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.
Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous finger in the pie, it
is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which
I now and then jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a
peculiarly ferocious shark—he was provided with still another protection. Suspended over the
side in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple
of keen whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach. This
procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and benevolent of them. They meant
Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the
circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled
water, those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a tail. But
poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there with that great iron hook—poor
Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then slacked off
the rope to every swell of the sea—what matters it, after all? Are you not the precious image
of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life;
those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you
are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with blue lips and
blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and
involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent,
consolatory glance hands him—what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him
a cup of tepid ginger and water!
“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. “Yes, this must be
ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing as if incredulous for a while, he
calmly walked towards the astonished steward slowly saying, “Ginger? ginger? and will you
have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is
ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal?
Ginger!—what the devil is ginger?—sea-coal?—firewood?—lucifer matches?—tinder?—
gunpowder?—what the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg
here.”
“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,” he suddenly
added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. “Will you look at that
14 The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were
ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in
order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of
his monkey-rope holder.
225
kannakin, sir; smell of it, if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added,
“The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there,
this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the
sort of bitters by which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?”
“I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”
“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug a harpooneer; none of your
apothecary’s medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got out insurances on
our lives and want to murder us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?”
“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger on board;
and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this ginger-jub—so she called
it.”
“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers, and get
something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain’s orders—grog for the
harpooneer on a whale.”
“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but—”
“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort; and this
fellow’s a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?”
“Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.”
When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of tea-caddy in the
other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt
Charity’s gift, and that was freely given to the waves.
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73. Stubb And Flask Kill A Right Whale; And
Then Have A Talk Over Him
It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s prodigious head hanging
to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it continue hanging there a while till we can get a
chance to attend to it. For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the
head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which,
by its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales,
a species of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those inferior
creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for them at all, and though
she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a
Sperm Whale had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the
announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity
offered.
Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats, Stubb’s and
Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further away, they at last became
almost invisible to the men at the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great
heap of tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the
boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being
dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster come to the
hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom,
within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel.
“Cut, cut!” was the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point
of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel’s side. But having plenty of line yet in
the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the
same time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the
struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened line in one
direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending strain threatened to take them
under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they
did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the
strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and
quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the
water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free to fly.
But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern
of the ship towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete circuit.
Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides,
Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle
went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale’s body,
rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager
Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that poured from the smitten rock.
At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a
corpse.
227
While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways
getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between them.
“I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” said Stubb, not without some
disgust at the thought of having to do with so ignoble a leviathan.
“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s bow, “did you never hear
that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s head hoisted on her starboard side, and at
the same time a Right Whale’s on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can
never afterwards capsize?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know
all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes think he’ll charm the ship to no good at last. I don’t
half like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a
snake’s head, Stubb?”
“Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a dark night, and he
standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down there, Flask”—pointing into the sea
with a peculiar motion of both hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil
in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been stowed away on
board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The reason why you don’t see his tail, is because he tucks it
up out of sight; he carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of
it, he’s always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots.”
“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve seen him lay of
nights in a coil of rigging.”
“No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the
rigging.”
“What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”
“Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”
“Bargain?—about what?”
“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying
to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of
that sort, and then he’ll surrender Moby Dick.”
“Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?”
“I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I tell ye. Why, they
say as how he went a sauntering into the old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish
easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he was at home,
and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, up and says, ‘I want
John.’ ‘What for?’ says the old governor, ‘What business is that of yours,’ says the devil,
getting mad,—‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take him,’ says the governor—and by the Lord, Flask, if
the devil didn’t give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with him, I’ll eat this
whale in one mouthful. But look sharp—aint you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and
let’s get the whale alongside.”
“I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” said Flask, when at last the two
boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship, “but I can’t remember
where.”
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“Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soldadoes? Did ye read it there,
Flask? I guess ye did?”
“No; never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you suppose
that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is now on board the
Pequod?”
“Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live for ever; who ever
heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil?
And if the devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can
crawl into a port-hole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?”
“How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”
“Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well, that’s the figure one; now take
all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold, and string ’em along in a row with that mast, for oughts,
do you see; well, that wouldn’t begin to be Fedallah’s age. Nor all the coopers in creation
couldn’t show hoops enough to make oughts enough.”
“But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you meant to give Fedallah
a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if he’s so old as all those hoops of yours come to,
and if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?”
“Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”
“But he’d crawl back.”
“Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”
“Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes, and drown you—what
then?”
“I should like to see him try it; I’d give him such a pair of black eyes that he wouldn’t dare to
show his face in the admiral’s cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the orlop there,
where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil,
Flask; do you suppose I’m afraid of the devil? Who’s afraid of him, except the old governor
who daresn’t catch him and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about
kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil kidnapped,
he’d roast for him? There’s a governor!”
“Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?”
“Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep a sharp
look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going on, I’ll just take him by the nape
of his neck, and say—Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the
Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a
wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump—do you see; and then, I
rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the
poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs.”
“And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?”
“Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?”
“Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?”
“Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.”
The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and
other necessaries were already prepared for securing him.
229
“Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this right whale’s head hoisted up
opposite that parmacetti’s.”
In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards
the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel;
though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s
head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back
again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish!
throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.
In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the same
preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm whale; only, in the
latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately
removed and hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is called
the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of
both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule
carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.
Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever and anon glancing
from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that
the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it seemed only
to blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were
bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.
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74. The Sperm Whale’s Head, Contrasted View
Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay
together our own.
Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the
most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer,
they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external
difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this
moment hanging from the Pequod’s side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by
merely stepping across the deck:—where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better
chance to study practical cetology than here?
In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads. Both are
massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm
Whale’s which the Right Whale’s sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale’s
head. As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of
pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and
salt color of his head at the summit, giving token of advanced age and large experience. In
short, he is what the fishermen technically call a “grey-headed whale.”
Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads—namely, the two most important
organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of
either whale’s jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you
would fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the
head.
Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he can never see
an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the
position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for
yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You
would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the
straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking
straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him,
any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two
backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that
makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?
Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as
imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the
brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic
feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in
valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ
imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct
picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him.
Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes
for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two
distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing
always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some
subsequent scenes.
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A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as
touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open
in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing
whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience will teach him, that
though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite
impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things—however large
or however small—at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side
and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each
by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to
bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary
consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must
simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than
man’s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects,
one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as
marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the
demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any
incongruity in this comparison.
It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary
vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the
timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this
indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and
diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.
But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an entire stranger to their race,
you might hunt over these two heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no
external leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so wondrously
minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With respect to their ears, this important
difference is to be observed between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the
former has an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a
membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an
eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were
broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of
cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why
then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.
Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over the sperm
whale’s head, so that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a
peep down the mouth; and were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with
a lantern we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let
us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and
chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white
membrane, glossy as bridal satins.
But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow
lid of an immense snuff-box, with a hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so
as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas!
it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling
force. But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky
whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging
straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship’s jib-boom. This
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whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine,
that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a
reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him.
In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised artist—is disengaged and
hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that
hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including
canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.
With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor; and when the
proper time comes—some few days after the other work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego,
being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade,
Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being
rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of
wild wood-lands. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down,
but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs,
and piled away like joists for building houses.
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