Public Domain Tales: Moby-Dick

**Public Domain Tales: Moby-Dick** is the thirty-ninth book in the Public Domain Tales series.

1. Loomings
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no
money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail
about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen,
and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily
pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and
especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral
principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my
substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his
sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it,
almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by
coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you
waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves,
and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the
crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties
Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent
sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean
reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking
over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a
still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and
plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the
green fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a
dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under
the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water
as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues.
Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,—north, east, south, and
west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the
compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you
please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the
stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest
reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to
water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American
desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting
bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs?
There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and
here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy
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smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of
mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though
this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain,
unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies
in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is
the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a
cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of
Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a
coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach?
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or
other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel
such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of
land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate
deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the
meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild
image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we
ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and
this is the key to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about
the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I
ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a
purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow
quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no,
I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to
those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and
tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,
without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as
cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on
ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously
buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more
respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous
dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the
mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the
forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and
make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort
of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an
old established family in the land, the van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And
more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it
as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a
keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of
Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the
decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New
Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I
promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who aint a slave?
Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they
may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that
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everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or
metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands
should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble,
whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary,
passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying
and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two
orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane
activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so
earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied
man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the
forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from
astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the
Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the
forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the
commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little
suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant
sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police
officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and
influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And,
doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of
Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo
between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run
something like this:
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for
this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in
high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though
I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can
see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various
disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the
delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating
judgment.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a
portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas
where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with
all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to
my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for
me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas,
and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and
could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms
with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of
the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two
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and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of
them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
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2. The Carpet-Bag
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape
Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford.
It was on a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little
packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer,
till the following Monday.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New
Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no
idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft,
because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous
old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been
gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old
Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original—the Tyre of this
Carthage;—the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from
Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give
chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little
sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobble-stones—so goes the story—to throw at the
whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the
bowsprit?
Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New Bedford, ere I
could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and
sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly
cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my
pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to
myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the
gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom you
may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t
be too particular.
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The Crossed Harpoons”—but it
looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the “Sword�Fish Inn,” there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and
ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a
hard, asphaltic pavement,—rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty
projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most
miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the
broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on,
Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are
stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me
waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! Blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a
candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the
week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light
proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a
careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did
was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost
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choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But “The Crossed
Harpoons,” and “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then, must needs be the sign of “The Trap.”
However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a
second, interior door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in
their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was
a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping
and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched
entertainment at the sign of “The Trap!”
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn
creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting
upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—
“The Spouter-Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a
common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from
there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the
dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the
ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to
it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning
over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up
a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a
mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed.
“In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose
works I possess the only copy extant—“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou
lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou
observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the
wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my
mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of
mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and
thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The
universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.
Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off
his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into
his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says
old Dives, in his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a
fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental
summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own
summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand
northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather
lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit
itself, in order to keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is
more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives
himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president
of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
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But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to
come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter”
may be.
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3. The Spouter-Inn
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry
with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.
On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced,
that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a
series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way
arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows,
that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England
hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest
contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little
window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea,
however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of
something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines
floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a
nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable
sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself
to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive
idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural
combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter
scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies
yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all
the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the
great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the
aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The
picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there
with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring
clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs
and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were
tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping
round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered
as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a
death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old
whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this
once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales
between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung in
Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterward slain off the Cape of Blanco. The
original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man,
travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut through what in old
times must have been a great central chimney with fire-places all round—you enter the public
room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old
wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s cockpits,
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especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On
one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty
rarities gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of
the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that
how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might
almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles,
flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name
indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells
the sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders
without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a
cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’
goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to
the full glass—the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining
by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I
desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a
bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to
sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a whalin’, so you’d better get
used to that sort of thing.”
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend
upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for
me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further
about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s
blanket.
“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper ’ll be ready directly.”
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a
ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently
working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail,
but he didn’t make much headway, I thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold
as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal
tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and
hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most
substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for
supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a
most direful manner.
“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”
“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer, is it?”
“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer is a dark
complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and likes
’em rare.”
“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”
“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
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I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark complexioned” harpooneer. At
any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must
undress and get into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do
with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the
Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a
full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.”
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild
set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled
in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they
seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this
was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the
whale’s mouth—the bar—when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured
them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah
mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for
all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off
the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island.
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers
newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous
not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he
refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since
the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping�partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description
of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I
have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his
white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some
reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he
was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall
mountaineers from the Alleganian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions
had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till
he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his
shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge favorite with them, they raised a cry
of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in pursuit of
him.
It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet after these
orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous
to the entrance of the seamen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with
your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are
sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a
strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor
was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody
else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure
they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover
yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
19
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of sleeping
with him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case
might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over.
Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards.
Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight—how could I tell from what vile
hole he had been coming?
“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan’t sleep with him. I’ll try
the bench here.”
“Just as you please; I’m sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it’s a plaguy
rough board here”—feeling of the knots and notches. “But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got
a carpenter’s plane there in the bar—wait, I say, and I’ll make ye snug enough.” So saying he
procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set
to planing away at my bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left;
till at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near
spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake to quit—the bed was soft enough to suit
me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a pine
plank. So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove
in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown study.
I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but that could be
mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other bench in the room was about
four inches higher than the planed one—so there was no yoking them. I then placed the first
bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall, leaving a little interval between,
for my back to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air
over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as
another current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed
a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to
spend the night.
The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a march on him—bolt his
door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the most violent knockings? It
seemed no bad idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the
next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the
entry, all ready to knock me down!
Still, looking around me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a sufferable night
unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that after all I might be cherishing
unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he
must be dropping in before long. I’ll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may
become jolly good bedfellows after all—there’s no telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and going to bed, yet
no sign of my harpooneer.
“Landlord!” said I, “what sort of a chap is he—does he always keep such late hours?” It was
now hard upon twelve o’clock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily tickled at
something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered, “generally he’s an early bird—
airley to bed and airley to rise—yes, he’s the bird what catches the worm.—But to-night he
went out a peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be,
he can’t sell his head.”
20
“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?” getting
into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually
engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around
this town?”
“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell it here, the market’s
overstocked.”
“With what?” shouted I.
“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I, quite calmly, “you’d better stop spinning that yarn to
me—I’m not green.”
“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess you’ll be
done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.”
“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of
the landlord’s.
“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
“Broke,” said I—“broke, do you mean?”
“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow storm,—“landlord, stop
whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too without delay. I come to your
house and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half
belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you
persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories, tending to beget in me an
uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow—a sort of
connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest degree. I now
demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall
be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good
as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this
harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, you I
mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render
yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sarmon for a chap that
rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of
has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads
(great curios, you know), and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to�night, cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin’ human heads about the
streets when folks is goin’ to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as
he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of
inions.”
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the landlord,
after all, had had no idea of fooling me—but at the same time what could I think of a
harpooneer who stayed out a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a
cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
“Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”
21
“He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting dreadful late, you had better be
turning flukes—it’s a nice bed: Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced.
There’s plenty room for two to kick about in that bed; it’s an almighty big bed that. Why,
afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a
dreaming and sprawling about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and
came near breaking his arm. After that, Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll give ye
a glim in a jiffy;” and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead
the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed “I vum
it’s Sunday—you won’t see that harpooneer to-night; he’s come to anchor somewhere—
come along then; do come; won’t ye come?”
I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered into a small
room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough
indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.
“There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did double duty as
a wash-stand and centre table; “there, make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye.”
I turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most elegant, it yet
stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and
centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four
walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly
belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one
corner; also a large seaman’s bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a
land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the
fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.
But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and felt it, and smelt
it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can
compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags
something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or
slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be
possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any
Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a
hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this
mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass
stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a
hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.
I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this head-peddling
harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the bed-side, I got up and took off
my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my
coat, and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half
undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer’s not
coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of
my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended
myself to the care of heaven.
Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I
rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At last I slid off into a light
doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a
22
heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room from under the
door.
Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler. But I lay
perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and
that identical New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without
looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the floor in one
corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of
as being in the room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time
while employed in unlacing the bag’s mouth. This accomplished, however, he turned
round—when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark purplish, yellow
color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares. Yes, it’s just as I
thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just
from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I
plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They
were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling
of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man—a whaleman too—who,
falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in
the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it,
thought I, after all! It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then,
what to make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and
completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good
coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun’s tanning a white man into a purplish
yellow one. However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced
these extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me
like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having
opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk,
and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the
room, he then took the New Zealand head—a ghastly thing enough—and crammed it down
into the bag. He now took off his hat—a new beaver hat—when I came nigh singing out with
fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head—none to speak of at least—nothing but a small
scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world
like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have
bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.
Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the second floor
back. I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed
my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and
confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the
devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid
of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory
answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms.
As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his
back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’
War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were
marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was
now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a
whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.
A peddler of heads too—perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to
mine—heavens! look at that tomahawk!
23
But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something that
completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen.
Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a
chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with
a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a three days’ old Congo baby. Remembering the
embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in
some similar manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal
like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it
proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fireplace, and removing the papered
fire-board, sets up this little hunchbacked image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The
chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place
made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.
I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at ease
meantime—to see what was next to follow. First he takes about a double handful of shavings
out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship
biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial
blaze.
Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers
(whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the
biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little
negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he never moved
his lips.
All these strange antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee,
who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other,
during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner.
At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again
in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.
All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now exhibiting
strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping into bed with me, I
thought it was high time, now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell into
which I had so long been bound.
But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.
Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then
holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco
smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk
between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a
sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.
Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against the wall, and
then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and
light the lamp again. But his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill
comprehended my meaning.
“Who-e debel you?”—he at last said—“you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.” And so saying the
lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.
“Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save
me!”
24
“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the cannibal, while his
horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought
my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the
room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again. “Queequeg here wouldn’t harm a hair of your
head.”
“Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didn’t you tell me that that infernal harpooneer
was a cannibal?”
“I thought ye know’d it;—didn’t I tell ye, he was peddlin’ heads around town?—but turn
flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here—you sabbee me, I sabbee you—this man
sleepe you—you sabbee?”—
“Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed.
“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to
one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood
looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking
cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a
human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell
him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don’t fancy having a man
smoking in bed with me. It’s dangerous. Besides, I aint insured.”
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me to get into
bed—rolling over to one side as much as to say—I wont touch a leg of ye.
“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
25
4. The Counterpane
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the
most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The
counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this
arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of
which were of one precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea
unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times—this
same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.
Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the
quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure
that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child, I well remember
a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never
could entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other—I
think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days
previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or
sending me to bed supperless,—my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and
packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the
longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up
stairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as
to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.
I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope for a
resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so
light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and
the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and worse—at last I got up, dressed,
and softly going down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw
myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favor to give me a good slippering for my
misbehavior; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of
time. But she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my
room. For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever
done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a
troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it—half steeped in dreams—I opened
my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a
shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but
a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the
nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely
seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most
awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one
single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided
away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days
and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the
mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.
Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine
were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing
Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events soberly
recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament.
26
For though I tried to move his arm—unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was,
he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to
rouse him—“Queequeg!”—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck
feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the
counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet�faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day,
with a cannibal and a tomahawk! “Queequeg!—in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!”
At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the
unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in
extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a
Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me,
and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a
dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him.
Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon
narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching
the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped
out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased
me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment
to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but,
the truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous
how essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he
treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness;
staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my curiosity
getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don’t see every
day, he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding.
He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one, by the by, and
then—still minus his trowsers—he hunted up his boots. What under the heavens he did it for,
I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush himself—boots in hand, and hat on—under
the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work
booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be
private when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition
state—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his
outlandishness in the strangest possible manner. His education was not yet completed. He
was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would
not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he
never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with
his hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began creaking and limping
about the room, as if, not being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled
cowhide ones—probably not made to order either—rather pinched and tormented him at the
first go off of a bitter cold morning.
Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street being very narrow,
the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and observing more and more the
indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on;
I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into
his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that
time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my
amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. He
then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre-table,
dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept
27
his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long
wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of
mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks.
Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers’s best cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I
wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of what fine steel the head of a
harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept.
The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the room, wrapped
up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal’s baton.
28
5. Breakfast
I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning landlord very
pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a
little in the matter of my bedfellow.
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s
the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to
anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent
in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is
more in that man than you perhaps think for.
The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night previous, and
whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and
second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and
harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an
unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young fellow’s healthy
cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot
have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades
lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still
lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks
ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed
like the Andes’ western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.
“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to breakfast.
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite
self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great New England traveller,
and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor.
But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the
taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the
sum of poor Mungo’s performances—this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best
mode of attaining a high social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had
anywhere.
These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we were all seated at
the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories about whaling; to my no small
surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked
embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest
bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and
duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of
the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though
they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious
sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!
But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the head of the table, too, it
so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest
admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him,
and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy
of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But that was certainly very coolly
29
done by him, and every one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is
to do it genteelly.
We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls,
and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was
over he withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was
sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for
a stroll.
30
6. The Street
If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as
Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon
departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the
queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets,
Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not
unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have
often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water street and Wapping. In these last�mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at
street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It
makes a stranger stare.
But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatabooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians,
and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets,
you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in
this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory
in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests,
and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green
Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old.
Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed
coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a
bombazine cloak.
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a downright bumpkin
dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of
tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a
distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical things
he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his
waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those
straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat
of the tempest.
But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show
her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen,
that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of
Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony.
The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil,
true enough; but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with
milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere
in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than
in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a
country?
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your
question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the
Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither
from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
31
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off
their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant
wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly
burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of green and
gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra�wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So
omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces
of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom
in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh
heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me
the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as
though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.
32
7. The Chapel
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody
fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to
the spot. I am sure that I did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this special errand. The sky
had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy
jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I
found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A muffled
silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper
seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and
incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and
women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the
wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not
pretend to quote:—
SACRED
To the Memory
of
JOHN TALBOT,
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard,
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY HIS SISTER.

* + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + -

SACRED
To the Memory
of
ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY,
NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY,
AND SAMUEL GLEIG,
Forming one of the boats’ crews
OF
THE SHIP ELIZA,
Who were towed out of sight by a Whale,
On the Off-shore Ground in the
PACIFIC,
December 31st, 1839.
THIS MARBLE
Is here placed by their surviving
Shipmates.

* + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + - * + -

SACRED
To the Memory
33
of
The late
CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY,
Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a
Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,
August 3d, 1833.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY
HIS WIDOW.
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and
turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the
scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage
was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one
who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall.
Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the
congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so
plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some
unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose
unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to
bleed afresh.
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can
say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these.
What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in
those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that
seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly
perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a
universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than
the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we
prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for
the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death�forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance,
yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be
comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all
the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will
terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers
her most vital hope.
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded
those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the
whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow
I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—
aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of
whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they
call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things
spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that
34
thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact
take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket;
and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
35
8. The Pulpit
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable robustness entered;
immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing
of him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain.
Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a
very great favorite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years
past had dedicated his life to the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in
the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second
flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of
a newly developing bloom—the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February’s snow.
No one having previously heard his history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple
without the utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about
him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that
he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran
down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the
floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were
one by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a
decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to such a
height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the
chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the
pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a
ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a
handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed,
and stained with a mahogany color, the whole contrivance, considering what manner of
chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the
ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple
cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailorlike but still reverential dexterity, hand over
hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with swinging ones, were of
cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At
my first glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these
joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father
Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately
drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable
in his little Quebec.
I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father Mapple
enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could not suspect him of
courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober
reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that
by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all
outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the
word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty
Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.
36
But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, borrowed from the
chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the
wall which formed its back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship
beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers. But high
above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from
which beamed forth an angel’s face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon
the ship’s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory’s plank
where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say, “beat on, beat on, thou noble
ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—
serenest azure is at hand.”
Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had achieved the ladder and
the picture. Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible
rested on the projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak.
What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the
rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick
wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of
breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage
out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
37
9. The Sermon
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people
to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard—larboard gangway to
starboard! Midships! midships!”
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter
shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across his
chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling
and praying at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is
foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but
changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and
joy—
“The ribs and terrors in the whale,

```
Arched over me a dismal gloom,

```

While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,

```
And lift me deepening down to doom.

```

“I saw the opening maw of hell,

```
With endless pains and sorrows there;

```

Which none but they that feel can tell—

```
Oh, I was plunging to despair.

```

“In black distress, I called my God,

```
When I could scarce believe him mine,

```

He bowed his ear to my complaints—

```
No more the whale did me confine.

```

“With speed he flew to my relief,

```
As on a radiant dolphin borne;

```

Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone

```
The face of my Deliverer God.

```

“My song for ever shall record

```
That terrible, that joyful hour;

```

I give the glory to my God,

```
His all the mercy and the power.”

```

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A
brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last,
folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse
of the first chapter of Jonah—“And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”
“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest
strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep
sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle
38
in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over
us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the
sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two�stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living
God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness,
suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the
deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai
was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that command
was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would
have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than
endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this
disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee
from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does
not reign, but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and
seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning
here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s
the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by
water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the
Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the
most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two
thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not
then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most
contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his
God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So
disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah,
on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How
plainly he’s a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,—no friends
accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds
the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its
Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark
the stranger’s evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in
vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no
innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other—‘Jack, he’s
robbed a widow;’ or, ‘Joe, do you mark him; he’s a bigamist;’ or, ‘Harry lad, I guess he’s the
adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from
Sodom.’ Another runs to read the bill that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which
the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and
containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all
his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him.
Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the
more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So
he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised,
they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the
Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he
almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. ‘I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon
sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now
stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing
39
glance. ‘We sail with the next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing
him. ‘No sooner, sir?’—‘Soon enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.’ Ha! Jonah,
that’s another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll sail with ye,’—
he says,—‘the passage money, how much is that,—I’ll pay now.’ For it is particularly
written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, ‘that he paid the
fare thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.
Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but
whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way
can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all
frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s purse, ere he judge him
openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it’s assented to. Then the Captain knows
that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with
gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain.
He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put
down for his passage. ‘Point out my state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now. ‘I’m travel-weary; I
need sleep.’ ‘Thou look’st like it,’ says the Captain, ‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and
would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the
Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts’ cells
being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself
into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is
close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship’s water-line,
Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in
the smallest of his bowel’s wards.
“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room; and
the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp,
flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to
the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels
among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his
tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for
his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor,
the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans,
‘straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’
“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with
conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more
strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy
anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe
he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is
the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s
prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted
wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was
the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear
the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the
boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard;
when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling
feet right over Jonah’s head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees
no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the
far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him.
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Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship—a berth in the cabin as I
have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his
dead ear, ‘What meanest thou, O sleeper! arise!’ Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry,
Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the
sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks.
Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and
aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon
shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees
the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the
tormented deep.
“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God�fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their
suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high
Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them.
The lot is Jonah’s; that discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions.
‘What is thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people?’ But mark
now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is,
and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise
another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah
by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath made
the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord
God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners
became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating
God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,—when wretched
Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that
for his sake this great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by
other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one
hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.
“And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an
oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with
him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless
commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws
awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like the Lord out of the fish’s belly.
But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto
learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct
deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to
God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look
towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous
for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah,
is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not
place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for
repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.”
While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without
seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed
tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms
seemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy
41
brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a
quick fear that was strange to them.
There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once
more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed
communing with God and himself.
But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of
the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:
“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read
ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and
therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly
would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen
as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah
teaches to me as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of
true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked
Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to
escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he
never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down
to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’
where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were
wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then
beyond the reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of hell’—when the whale grounded upon
the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he
cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea,
the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air
and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a
second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still
multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was
that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights
it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil
upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please
rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to
him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though
to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while
preaching to others is himself a castaway!”
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again,
showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,—“But oh!
shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of
that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson
is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods
and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him
whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone
down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and
destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.
Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his
God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of
the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal
delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final
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breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have
striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave
eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so
remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.
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10. A Bosom Friend
Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone; he having
left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire,
with his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little
negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its
nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.
But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the table, took up a
large book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity;
at every fiftieth page—as I fancied—stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and
giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin
again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could
not count more than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found
together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about
the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no
means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought
I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold,
there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there
was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether
maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it
was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief,
and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but
certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it
reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the
same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very
projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George
Washington cannibalistically developed.
Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking out at the
storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled himself with so much
as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous
book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous, and
especially considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the
morning, I thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at
times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self�collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never
consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances
whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck
me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it.
Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—
which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as
though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the
utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this
was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as
that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or
so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I
conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his digester.”
44
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its
first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and
phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the
storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a
melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the
wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference
speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he
was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.
And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that
thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but
hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing
my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these advances; but presently,
upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were
again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little
complimented.
We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the purpose of the
printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest;
and from that we went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen
in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and
tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild
pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us.
If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast, this pleasant,
genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite
as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his
forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married;
meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if
need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too
premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not
apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me
a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the
tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and
said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my
trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol,
and removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment
whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church.
How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is
worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black
wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what
is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—
that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this
Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of
worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I
kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with
45
Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed
and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to
sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between
friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and
some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our
hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
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11. Nightgown
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then
affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so
entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations,
what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again,
though day-break was yet some way down the future.
Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow
wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked
around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and
our two noses bending over them, as if our knee-pans were warming-pans. We felt very nice
and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too,
seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily
warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not
what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all
over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable
any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your
head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most
delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be
furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of
this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness
and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an
arctic crystal.
We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once I thought I
would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether
asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to
concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity
aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our
essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and
coming out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer
gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion.
Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light,
seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet
puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his
smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love
once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by
me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. I no more
felt unduly concerned for the landlord’s policy of insurance. I was only alive to the
condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend.
With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one
to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the
flame of the new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know
not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go
on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his
words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken
47
phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere
skeleton I give.
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12. Biographical
Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not
down in any map; true places never are.
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout,
followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg’s
ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen
whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the
maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was
excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal
propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.
A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands.
But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his
father’s influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled
off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island.
On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove
thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with
its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding
by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized
and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck,
grappled a ringbolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked
wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate
dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told
him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage—this sea Prince of Wales,
never saw the captain’s cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman
of him. But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg
disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening
his untutored countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound
desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than
they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of
whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked;
infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing
what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their
wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world
in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and
tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from
home.
By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since
he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last
accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather
Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan
Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,—as soon as he felt himself
baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in
49
all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a
sceptre now.
I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements. He
answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that whaling was my
own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most
promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to
accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same
boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his,
boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the
affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not
fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of
whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.
His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his
forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way
and that, and very soon were sleeping.
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13. Wheelbarrow
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I
settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my comrade’s money. The grinning
landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which
had sprung up between me and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories
about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person whom I now
companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor carpet-bag,
and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to “the Moss,” the little
Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared;
not at Queequeg so much—for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—
but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we heeded them not, going along
wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on
his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied,
that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own
harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply
intimate with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go
into the farmers’ meadows armed with their own scythes—though in no wise obliged to
furnished them—even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first
wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had
lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant
about the thing—though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to
manage the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the
barrow and marches up the wharf. “Why,” said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better
than that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?”
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their
wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash
like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided
mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko,
and its commander—from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea
captain—this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty
young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the
bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed
himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King,
Queequeg’s father. Grace being said,—for those people have their grace as well as we—
though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters,
they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—
Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of
the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the
blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony,
and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain precedence over a mere
island King, especially in the King’s own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his
hands in the punch bowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. “Now,” said
Queequeg, “what you tink now,—Didn’t our people laugh?”
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At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it
glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their
ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on
casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay
silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers,
with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were
on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a
second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness,
yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the quick
foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I
spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish
heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no
records.
At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky nostrils
swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew, and our offing gained,
the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her brows as a slave before the Sultan.
Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts
buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we
stood by the plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of
the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so
companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed
negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness,
must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these
young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin’s hour of doom was
come. Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost
miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping
his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while
Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a
puff.
“Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer; “Capting, Capting,
here’s the devil.”
“Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to Queequeg, “what in
thunder do you mean by that? Don’t you know you might have killed that chap?”
“What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
“He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,” pointing to the still shivering
greenhorn.
“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of disdain,
“ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big
whale!”
“Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any more of your
tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his own eye. The
prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom
was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The
poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in
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a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to
left, and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point
of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done;
those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the lower jaw
of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his
knees, and crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to
the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept
over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe. The
schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern boat,
Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For
three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out
before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked
at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down.
Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg now took an instant’s glance
around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few
minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a
lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands
voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to
Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a
medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water—fresh
water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and
leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to
himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these
Christians.”
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14. Nantucket
Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely
arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies;
how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a
mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there
than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights
will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally; that they import
Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask;
that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that
people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that
one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear
quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes; that they are so shut up, belted about,
every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very
chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles.
But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men.
Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast,
and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child
borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction.
Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they
found an empty ivory casket,—the poor little Indian’s skeleton.
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a
livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out
with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at
last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant
belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all
oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood;
most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with
such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than
his most fearless and malicious assaults!
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the
sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among
them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let
America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all
India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are
the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen
having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones
but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the
road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without
seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone
resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro
ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a
Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives
on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as
54
chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it
at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.
With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows;
so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest,
while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
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15. Chowder
It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to anchor, and Queequeg
and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a
bed. The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the
Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all
Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous
for his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot�luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on
our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the
larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the
first man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us
at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse—our first
point of departure—must be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin
to say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now
and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to something
which there was no mistaking.
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears, swung from the
cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the cross�trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a
gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help
staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up
to the two remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s
ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones
staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black
pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?
I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow hair and a
yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that
looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple
woollen shirt.
“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”
“Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”
And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely
competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed,
Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and
seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us
and said—“Clam or Cod?”
“What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness.
“Clam or Cod?” she repeated.
“A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?” says I; “but that’s a
rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain’t it, Mrs Hussey?”
But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple shirt, who was waiting for
it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word “clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried
towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out “clam for two,” disappeared.
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“Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper for us both on one clam?”
However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless
prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully
explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely
bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little
flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our
appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his
favorite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we
despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs.
Hussey’s clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to
the kitchen door, I uttered the word “cod” with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a
few moments the savory steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time
a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.
We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder
now if this here has any effect on the head? What’s that stultifying saying about chowder�headed people? “But look, Queequeg, ain’t that a live eel in your bowl? Where’s your
harpoon?”
Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there
were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder
for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before
the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish
vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There
was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning
happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s
brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod’s
decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.
Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning the
nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs, the lady reached
forth her arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. “Why
not?” said I; “every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon—but why not?” “Because it’s
dangerous,” says she. “Ever since young Stiggs coming from that unfort’nt v’y’ge of his,
when he was gone four years and a half, with only three barrels of ile, was found dead in my
first floor back, with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich
dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg” (for she had learned his
name), “I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam
or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?”
“Both,” says I; “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety.”
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16. The Ship
In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no small concern,
Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been diligently consulting Yojo—the
name of his black little god—and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly
insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in
harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that
the selection of the ship should rest wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending
us; and, in order to do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I,
Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by chance;
and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.
I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great confidence in the
excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with
considerable esteem, as a rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the
whole, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection of our craft; I did not
like that plan at all. I had not a little relied on Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler
best fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced no
effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this
business with a determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that
trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little
bedroom—for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting,
humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that day; how it was I never could find out,
for, though I applied myself to it several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX
Articles—leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself
at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After much prolonged
sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were three ships up for three-years’
voyages—The Devil-Dam the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. Devil-Dam, I do not know the origin
of; Tit-bit is obvious; Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated
tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about
the Devil-Dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and, finally, going on board the Pequod,
looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;—squared-toed
luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for
it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old
school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long
seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s
complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and
Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of
Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like
the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like
the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all
these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild
business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years
her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman,
and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term of his chief�mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness
58
both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved
buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy
with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking
herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks
were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale,
inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not
through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a
turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass,
curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who
steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by
clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are
touched with that.
Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority, in order to
propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw nobody; but I could not well
overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It
seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high;
consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest
part of the jaws of the right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these
slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted
point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like a top-knot on some old
Pottowotamie Sachem’s head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so
that the insider commanded a complete view forward.
And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect seemed to
have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying
respite from the burden of command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair,
wriggling all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a stout
interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.
There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the elderly man I saw;
he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut
in the Quaker style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest
wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual sailings in
many hard gales, and always looking to windward;—for this causes the muscles about the
eyes to become pursed together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
“Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” said I, advancing to the door of the tent.
“Supposing it be the Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?” he demanded.
“I was thinking of shipping.”
“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou are no Nantucketer—ever been in a stove boat?”
“No, Sir, I never have.”
“Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?”
“Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been several voyages in the
merchant service, and I think that—”
“Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?—I’ll take that leg
away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant service to me again. Marchant
service indeed! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant
ships. But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?—it looks a little
59
suspicious, don’t it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain,
didst thou?—Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?”
I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of these half humorous
inuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular
prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
Vineyard.
“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping ye.”
“Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
“Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”
“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”
“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”
“I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.”
“Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to, young man. It belongs
to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all
her needs, including crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou
wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of finding it out
before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and
thou wilt find that he has only one leg.”
“What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?”
“Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by
the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!—ah, ah!”
I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in his
concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could, “What you say is no doubt true
enough, sir; but how could I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale,
though indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident.”
“Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see; thou dost not talk shark a
bit. Sure, ye’ve been to sea before now; sure of that?”
“Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the merchant—”
“Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant service—don’t aggravate me—
I won’t have it. But let us understand each other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling
is; do ye yet feel inclined for it?”
“I do, sir.”
“Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat, and then
jump after it? Answer, quick!”
“I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid of, that is; which I
don’t take to be the fact.”
“Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by experience
what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world? Was not that what ye said?
I thought so. Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and
then back to me and tell me what ye see there.”
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For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take
it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow’s feet into one scowl,
Captain Peleg started me on the errand.
Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her
anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect
was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I
could see.
“Well, what’s the report? said Peleg when I came back; what did ye see?”
“Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there’s a squall
coming up, I think.”
“Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to
see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where you stand?”
I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the Pequod was as good a
ship as any—I thought the best—and all this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so
determined, he expressed his willingness to ship me.
“And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he added—“come along with ye.” And
so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.
Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising figure. It
turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners
of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd
of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the
value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket
invest their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state
stocks bringing in good interest.
Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island
having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in
an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously
modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are
the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are
Quakers with a vengeance.
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names—a
singularly common fashion on the island—and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately
dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a
thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan
Roman. And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a
globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many
long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the
north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or
savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby
chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty
language—that man makes one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature,
formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either
by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at
the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a certain
morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet
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we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed
peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual
circumstances.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain
Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those
selfsame serious things the veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally
educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean
life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn—all that had not
moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his
vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about
worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against
land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a
sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns
of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad
reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him
much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a
man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.
Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad
shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally
a ship-owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly
retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the
quiet receiving of his well-earned income.
Now Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in
his sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly
seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving
home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a
pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted to say the least. He
never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity
of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab�colored eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch
something—a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other,
never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished from before him. His own person was the
exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare
flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of
his broad-brimmed hat.
Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I followed Captain Peleg
down into the cabin. The space between the decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old
Bildad, who always sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim
was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned up to his
chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.
“Bildad,” cried Captain Peleg, “at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying those
Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?”
As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, Bildad, without noticing his
present irreverence, quietly looked up, and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards
Peleg.
“He says he’s our man, Bildad,” said Peleg, “he wants to ship.”
“Dost thee?” said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
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“I dost,” said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
“What do ye think of him,” Bildad? said Peleg.
“He’ll do,” said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book in a
mumbling tone quite audible.
I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg, his friend and old
shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg
now threw open a chest, and drawing forth the ship’s articles, placed pen and ink before him,
and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time to settle with myself at
what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already aware that in the
whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain
shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of
importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company. I was also aware that
being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very large; but considering that I
was used to the sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from
all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of the clear
nett proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th
lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a lucky
voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my
three years’ beef and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver.
It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely fortune—and so it was,
a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and
am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this
grim sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay would be about
the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I
was of a broad-shouldered make.
But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about receiving a generous share
of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard something of both Captain Peleg and his
unaccountable old crony Bildad; how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod,
therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the whole
management of the ship’s affairs to these two. And I did not know but what the stingy old
Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him
on board the Pequod, quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own
fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to
my no small surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these proceedings;
Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, “Lay not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth—”
“Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what lay shall we give this young
man?”
“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and seventy-seventh
wouldn’t be too much, would it?—‘where moth and rust do corrupt, but lay—’”
Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and seventy-seventh! Well, old
Bildad, you are determined that I, for one, shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth
and rust do corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed; and though from the
magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightest consideration
will show that though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when
you come to make a teenth of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy�63
seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold
doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want to swindle this young man!
he must have more than that.”
“Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes; and then
went on mumbling—“for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, “do ye hear that, Bildad!
The three hundredth lay, I say.”
Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, “Captain Peleg, thou hast
a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest to the other owners of this
ship—widows and orphans, many of them—and that if we too abundantly reward the labors
of this young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. The
seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.”
“Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. “Blast ye, Captain
Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to
lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape
Horn.”
“Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water, or
ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man, captain Peleg, I greatly fear
lest thy conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the
fiery pit, Captain Peleg.”
“Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye insult me. It’s an all-fired
outrage to tell any human creature that he’s bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that
again to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I’ll—I’ll—yes, I’ll swallow a live goat with all his
hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-colored son of a wooden gun—a straight
wake with ye!”
As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous oblique, sliding
celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.
Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and responsible owners of the
ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned
and temporarily commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who, I
made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened wrath of Peleg. But to
my astonishment, he sat down again on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the
slightest intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways.
As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he,
too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. “Whew!”
he whistled at last—“the squall’s gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at
sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone. That’s
he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man, Ishmael’s thy name, didn’t ye say? Well
then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth lay.”
“Captain Peleg,” said I, “I have a friend with me who wants to ship too—shall I bring him
down to-morrow?”
“To be sure,” said Peleg. “Fetch him along, and we’ll look at him.”
“What lay does he want?” groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in which he had again
been burying himself.
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“Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,” said Peleg. “Has he ever whaled it any?” turning to
me.
“Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.”
“Well, bring him along then.”
And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had done a good
morning’s work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship that Yojo had provided to carry
Queequeg and me round the Cape.
But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the captain with whom I was to
sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be
completely fitted out, and receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible
by arriving to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the shore
intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing
concernment of that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but leaves
her to the owners till all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at him
before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back I accosted Captain
Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
“And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art shipped.”
“Yes, but I should like to see him.”
“But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly what’s the matter with
him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he
ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either. Any how, young man, he won’t always see me, so I
don’t suppose he will thee. He’s a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good
one. Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man,
Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark
ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the
cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier
stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle!
Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old,
thou knowest, was a crowned king!”
“And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his
blood?”
“Come hither to me—hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance in his eye that almost
startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere.
Captain Ahab did not name himself. ’Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed
mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at
Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like
her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It’s a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I’ve
sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is—a good man—not a pious, good man,
like Bildad, but a swearing good man—something like me—only there’s a good deal more of
him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he
was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding
stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his
leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and
savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee,
young man, it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good�bye to thee—and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name.
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Besides, my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet, resigned girl. Think of
that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless
harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”
As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to me of
Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And
somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don’t know what,
unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of
awe, which I cannot at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt
it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed like
mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. However, my thoughts were at
length carried in other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
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17. The Ramadan
As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not
choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards
everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart
to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures
in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other
planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the
inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.
I say, we good Presbyterian christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy
ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy
conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd
notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he
was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with
him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and
Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need
mending.
Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must be over, I
went up to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was
fastened inside. “Queequeg,” said I softly through the key-hole:—all silent. “I say,
Queequeg! why don’t you speak? It’s I—Ishmael.” But all remained still as before. I began to
grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had an
apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner of the
room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the
foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold
resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady the
evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That’s strange,
thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes
abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.
“Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. Something must have happened. Apoplexy! I tried to
burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my
suspicions to the first person I met—the chambermaid. “La! La!” she cried, “I thought
something must be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was
locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s been just so silent ever since. But I thought,
may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage in for safe keeping. La! La,
ma’am!—Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!”—and with these cries, she ran towards
the kitchen, I following.
Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet in the other,
having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding her
little black boy meantime.
“Wood-house!” cried I, “which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch something to pry
open the door—the axe!—the axe! he’s had a stroke; depend upon it!”—and so saying I was
unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the
mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.
“What’s the matter with you, young man?”
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“Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open!”
“Look here,” said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one
hand free; “look here; are you talking about prying open any of my doors?”—and with that
she seized my arm. “What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you, shipmate?”
In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the whole case.
Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an
instant; then exclaimed—“No! I haven’t seen it since I put it there.” Running to a little closet
under the landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg’s
harpoon was missing. “He’s killed himself,” she cried. “It’s unfort’nate stiggs done over
again—there goes another counterpane—god pity his poor mother!—it will be the ruin of my
house. Has the poor lad a sister? Where’s that girl?—there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter,
and tell him to paint me a sign, with—‘no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the
parlor;’—might as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his ghost!
What’s that noise there? You, young man, avast there!”
And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the door.
“I won’t allow it; I won’t have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith, there’s one about a
mile from here. But avast!” putting her hand in her side-pocket, “here’s a key that’ll fit, I
guess; let’s see.” And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg’s supplemental
bolt remained unwithdrawn within.
“Have to burst it open,” said I, and was running down the entry a little, for a good start, when
the landlady caught at me, again vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore
from her, and with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.
With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the wall, sent the
plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self�collected; right in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of
his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with
scarce a sign of active life.
“Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, “Queequeg, what’s the matter with you?”
“He hain’t been a sittin’ so all day, has he?” said the landlady.
But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt like pushing him over, so
as to change his position, for it was almost intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally
constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of eight or ten
hours, going too without his regular meals.
“Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s alive at all events; so leave us, if you please, and I will see to this
strange affair myself.”
Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to take a chair;
but in vain. There he sat; and all he could do—for all my polite arts and blandishments—he
would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in
any the slightest way.
I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast on their hams
that way in his native island. It must be so; yes, it’s part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let
him rest; he’ll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can’t last for ever, thank God, and his
Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don’t believe it’s very punctual then.
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I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long stories of some sailors
who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling�voyage in a schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only);
after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o’clock, I went up stairs to go to
bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a
termination. But no; there he was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began
to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all
day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head.
“For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have some supper.
You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself, Queequeg.” But not a word did he reply.
Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a
great while, he would follow me. But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket,
and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his
ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the faintest doze.
I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting
there in that uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched.
Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this
dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!
But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of day; when, looking
over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor. But
as soon as the first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints,
but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again against
mine; and said his Ramadan was over.
Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so
long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t
believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive
torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I
think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I, “get into bed now, and lie and
listen to me.” I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress of the primitive religions,
and coming down to the various religions of the present time, during which time I labored to
show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold,
cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in
short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in
other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly
pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his.
Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts
born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic
religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg,
said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and
since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia; expressing the
idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion.
It was after a great feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein
fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o’clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and
eaten that very evening.
69
“No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew the inferences without
his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me
that it was the custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in
the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed in great wooden
trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some
parsley in their mouths, were sent round with the victor’s compliments to all his friends, just
as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.
After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much impression upon
Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important
subject, unless considered from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not
more than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he no
doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than I did. He looked at me
with a sort of condescending concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity
that such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of
chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of his
Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with
halibut bones.
70
18. His Mark
As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his
harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had
not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals
on board that craft, unless they previously produced their papers.
“What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and
leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
“I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”
“Yea,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from behind Peleg’s, out of
the wigwam. “He must show that he’s converted. Son of darkness,” he added, turning to
Queequeg, “art thou at present in communion with any christian church?”
“Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the first Congregational Church.” Here be it said, that many
tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches.
“First Congregational Church,” cried Bildad, “what! that worships in Deacon Deuteronomy
Coleman’s meeting-house?” and so saying, taking out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his
great yellow bandana handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the
wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg.
“How long hath he been a member?” he then said, turning to me; “not very long, I rather
guess, young man.”
“No,” said Peleg, “and he hasn’t been baptized right either, or it would have washed some of
that devil’s blue off his face.”
“Do tell, now,” cried Bildad, “is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy’s
meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord’s day.”
“I don’t know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,” said I, “all I know is,
that Queequeg here is a born member of the First Congregational Church. He is a deacon
himself, Queequeg is.”
“Young man,” said Bildad sternly, “thou art skylarking with me—explain thyself, thou young
Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me.”
Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. “I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to
which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every
mother’s son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole
worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets
noways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands.”
“Splice, thou mean’st splice hands, cried Peleg, drawing nearer. “Young man, you’d better
ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon
Deuteronomy—why Father Mapple himself couldn’t beat it, and he’s reckoned something.
Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there—what’s
that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he’s got
there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever
your name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?”
71
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from
thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left
knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—
“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale
eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad
brim, clean across the ship’s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad
whale dead.”
“Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying
harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. “Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the
ship’s papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye,
Quohog, we’ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than ever was given a harpooneer yet
out of Nantucket.”
So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled among the
same ship’s company to which I myself belonged.
When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for signing, he turned
to me and said, “I guess Quohog there don’t know how to write, does he? I say, Quohog,
blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy mark?”
But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part in similar
ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen, copied upon the paper, in
the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his
arm; so that through Captain Peleg’s obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood
something like this:—
Quohog.
his mark.
Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising
solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle
of tracts, and selecting one entitled “The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,” placed it
in Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his, looked earnestly
into his eyes, and said, “Son of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this
ship, and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways,
which I sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell,
and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness
gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!”
Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language, heterogeneously mixed with
Scriptural and domestic phrases.
“Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,” cried Peleg. “Pious
harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ’em; no harpooneer is
worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat�72
header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good.
He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales,
for fear of after-claps in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.”
“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou thyself, as I myself, hast seen
many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then,
can’st thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when
this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same
voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did’st thou not think of Death and the
Judgment then?”
“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and thrusting his hands
far down into his pockets,—“hear him, all of ye. Think of that! When every moment we
thought the ship would sink! Death and the judgment then? What? With all three masts
making such an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore
and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life
was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands—how to rig jury�masts—how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.”
Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we followed him.
There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sail-makers who were mending a top-sail in
the waist. Now and then he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which
otherwise might have been wasted.
73
19. The Prophet
“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”
Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the water, for the
moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words were put to us by a
stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He
was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black
handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his
face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have
been dried up.
“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little more time for an
uninterrupted look at him.
“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly
shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the
object.
“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”
“Anything down there about your souls?”
“About what?”
“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I know many chaps
that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of
a fifth wheel to a wagon.”
“What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.
“He’s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps,”
abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the word he.
“Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he’s talking
about something and somebody we don’t know.”
“Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old Thunder yet, have ye?”
“Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his manner.
“Captain Ahab.”
“What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”
“Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav’n’t seen him yet,
have ye?”
“No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be all right again before
long.”
“All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh.
“Look ye; when captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be all right; not
before.”
“What do you know about him?”
74
“What did they tell you about him? Say that!”
“They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that he’s a good whale-hunter,
and a good captain to his crew.”
“That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he gives an order.
Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the word with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that
thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and
nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?—
heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing
about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about
them matters and something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who knows
it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve heard tell about the leg, and
how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, that every one knows a’most—I
mean they know he’s only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off.”
“My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don’t know, and I don’t much
care; for it seems to me that you must be a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking
of Captain Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the
loss of his leg.”
“All about it, eh—sure you do?—all?”
“Pretty sure.”
With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger stood a moment,
as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and said:—“Ye’ve shipped, have ye?
Names down on the papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will be;
and then again, perhaps it wont be, after all. Any how, it’s all fixed and arranged a’ready; and
some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity
’em! Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I’m sorry I stopped
ye.”
“Look here, friend,” said I, “if you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you
are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game; that’s all I have to say.”
“And it’s said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are just the man for
him—the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning! Oh, when ye get there, tell ’em
I’ve concluded not to make one of ’em.”
“Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way—you can’t fool us. It is the easiest thing in
the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.”
“Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.”
“Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, Queequeg, let’s leave this crazy man. But stop, tell me
your name, will you?”
“Elijah.”
Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other’s fashion, upon
this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear.
But we had not gone perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and
looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance.
Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind,
but passed on with my comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same
corner that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging us, but with what
75
intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous,
half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague
wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab;
and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain
Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw
Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.
I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really dogging us or not, and
with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But
Elijah passed on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally
as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
76
20. All Astir
A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not only were the old
sails being mended, but new sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of
rigging; in short, everything betokened that the ship’s preparations were hurrying to a close.
Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp look-out
upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing at the stores; and the men
employed in the hold and on the rigging were working till long after night-fall.
On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was given at all the inns where
the ship’s company were stopping, that their chests must be on board before night, for there
was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps,
resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they always give very long
notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail for several days. But no wonder; there was a
good deal to be done, and there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the
Pequod was fully equipped.
Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives and forks, shovels
and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are indispensable to the business of
housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the
wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though
this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as with
whalemen. For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar
to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote
harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the
most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the very
things upon which the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare
spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare captain and
duplicate ship.
At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had been almost
completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before
hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and
ends of things, both large and small.
Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad’s sister, a lean old
lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed
resolved that, if she could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once
fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the
steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept
his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic back. Never
did any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody
called her. And like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and
thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort,
and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned,
and in which she herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.
But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the
last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor
was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with
him a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite
77
that article upon the paper. Every once and a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone
den, roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and
then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as often I asked
about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come on board his ship. To
these questions they would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected
aboard every day; meantime, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything
necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been downright honest with myself, I
would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way
to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute
dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any
wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives
to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said
nothing, and tried to think nothing.
At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would certainly sail. So next
morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.
78
21. Going Aboard
It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf.
“There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I to Queequeg, “it can’t be
shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess; come on!”
“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid a hand
upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a
little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
“Going aboard?”
“Hands off, will you,” said I.
“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way!”
“Aint going aboard, then?”
“Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I
consider you a little impertinent?”
“No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to
Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.
“Elijah,” said I, “you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the
Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained.”
“Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?”
“He’s cracked, Queequeg,” said I, “come on.”
“Holloa!” cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces.
“Never mind him,” said I, “Queequeg, come on.”
But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said—“Did ye
see anything looking like men going towards that ship a while ago?”
Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, “Yes, I thought I did see four
or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.”
“Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.”
Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder
again, said, “See if you can find ’em now, will ye?”
“Find who?”
“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was going to warn ye
against—but never mind, never mind—it’s all one, all in the family too;—sharp frost this
morning, ain’t it? Good bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it’s before
the Grand Jury.” And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving me, for the
moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.
At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound quiet, not a soul
moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with
coils of rigging. Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open.
Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a tattered pea�79
jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in
his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept upon him.
“Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?” said I, looking dubiously at
the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I
now alluded to; hence I would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that
matter, were it not for Elijah’s otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down;
and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up
with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the
sleeper’s rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly
down there.
“Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” said I.
“Oh! perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, “my country way; won’t hurt him face.”
“Face!” said I, “call that his face? very benevolent countenance then; but how hard he
breathes, he’s heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you are heavy, it’s grinding the face of the
poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, he’ll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don’t wake.”
Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his tomahawk
pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the other.
Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand
that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and
great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for
ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or
ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient
on an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into walking�sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of
himself under a spreading tree, perhaps in some damp marshy place.
While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk from me, he
flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s head.
“What’s that for, Queequeg?”
“Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!”
He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe, which, it seemed,
had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his soul, when we were directly
attracted to the sleeping rigger. The strong vapor now completely filling the contracted hole,
it began to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the
nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who be ye smokers?”
“Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?”
“Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain came aboard last night.”
“What Captain?—Ahab?”
“Who but him indeed?”
I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a noise on
deck.
“Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief mate, that; good man, and a
pious; but all alive now, I must turn to.” And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.
80
It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the riggers
bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and several of the shore people were
busy in bringing various last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly
enshrined within his cabin.
81
22. Merry Christmas
At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s riggers, and after the Pequod
had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a
whaleboat, with her last gift—a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and
a spare bible for the steward—after all this, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from
the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:
“Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is all ready—just spoke
to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster ’em aft
here—blast ’em!”
“No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,” said Bildad, “but away with
thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.”
How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and Captain
Bildad were going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint�commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of
him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then, the idea was, that his
presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well
out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot’s; and as he was not
yet completely recovered—so they said—therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this
seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant service many captains never show
themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the
cabin table, having a farewell merrymaking with their shore friends, before they quit the ship
for good with the pilot.
But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all alive.
He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.
“Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast. “Mr.
Starbuck, drive ’em aft.”
“Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was
never pitched except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the
tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
“Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next command, and the crew
sprang for the handspikes.
Now, in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of
the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other offices, was
one of the licensed pilots of the port—he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in
order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted
any other craft—Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows
for the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody,
to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in
Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told
them that no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in getting
under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each
seaman’s berth.
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Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and swore astern in the
most frightful manner. I almost thought he would sink the ship before the anchor could be got
up; involuntarily I paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of
the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was
comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some
salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp
poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act
of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first kick.
“Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared. “Spring, thou sheep-head;
spring, and break thy backbone! why don’t ye spring, I say, all of ye—spring! Quohog!
spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotchcap; spring, thou green pants.
Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!” And so saying, he moved along the
windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading
off with his psalmody. Thinks I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold
Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad
upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long
rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of
some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.
Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived
into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the
cordage rang, his steady notes were heard,—
“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,

```
Stand dressed in living green.

```

So to the Jews old Canaan stood,

```
While Jordan rolled between.”

```

Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and
fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and
wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads
and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted,
remains at midsummer.
At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sail�boat that had accompanied us began ranging alongside.
It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture,
especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound
on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some
thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as
captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the
pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,—
poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to
speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked
towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents;
looked towards the land, looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere;
and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the
hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as
to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”
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As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his philosophy, there was
a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run
from cabin to deck—now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.
But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him,—“Captain Bildad—
come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come
close alongside, now! Careful, careful!—come, Bildad, boy—say your last. Luck to ye,
Starbuck—luck to ye, Mr. Stubb—luck to ye, Mr. Flask—good-bye, and good luck to ye
all—and this day three years I’ll have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah
and away!”
“God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured old Bildad, almost
incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may soon be moving
among ye—a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye’ll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage
ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers;
good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent. within the year. Don’t forget your
prayers, either. Mr Starbuck, mind that cooper don’t waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail�needles are in the green locker! Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but don’t miss
a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce,
Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of
fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don’t keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr.
Starbuck; it’ll spoil. Be careful with the butter—twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye,
if—”
“Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!” and with that, Peleg hurried him
over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew
overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly
plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.
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23. The Lee Shore
Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered
in New Bedford at the inn.
When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold
malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with
sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four
years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous
term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the
unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave
of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that
miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful;
in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to
our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly
all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder
through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights
’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s
landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest
foe!
Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth;
that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open
independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on
the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better
is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that
were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the
terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly,
demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
85
24. The Advocate
As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business
of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and
disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice
hereby done to us hunters of whales.
In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among
people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the
liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society,
it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the
company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the
initials S. W. F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be
deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they
think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when
actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are,
that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial
Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. And as for the matter of the
alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto
pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm
whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge
in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the
unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all
ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier’s
profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery,
would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning into eddies the
air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the
interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the
profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and
candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen
are, and have been.
Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis
XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely
invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did
Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of
£1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the
rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels;
manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
at the time of sailing, $20,000,000; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped
harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?
But this is not the half; look again.
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single
peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the
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whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling.
One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that
Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a
hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past
the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the
earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or
Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in
once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which
originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They
may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes, your
Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that
were as great, and greater than your Cooke and your Krusenstern. For in their succorless
emptyhandedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded,
javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and
muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South
Sea Voyages, those things were but the lifetime commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers.
Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted
unworthy of being set down in the ship’s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!
Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any
intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent
Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the
jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might
be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili,
and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in
those parts.
That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened
world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships
long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The
whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first
Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the
benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The
uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the
whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases
carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan,
is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for
already she is on the threshold.
But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no æsthetically noble
associations connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and
unhorse you with a split helmet every time.
The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.
The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first
account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a
whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal
pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who
pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
87
True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their
veins.
No good blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there. The
grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger,
one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and
harpooneers—all kith and kin to noble Benjamin—this day darting the barbed iron from one
side of the world to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is
declared a royal fish.
Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way.
The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs given to
a Roman general upon his entering the world’s capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the
way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.\*
Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in whaling.
No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus is a
constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it
off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and
fifty whales. I account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who
boasted of taking as many walled towns.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I
shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be
unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might
rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my
creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor
and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
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25. Postscript
In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But
after embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable
surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be
blameworthy?
It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain
curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of
state, so called, and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who
knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as
a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run
well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential
dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly
a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man
who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him
somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality.
But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is used at coronations?
Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil,
nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured,
unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation
stuff!
89
26. Knights And Squires
The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent.
He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure
hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live
blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general
drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some
thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical
superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting
anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the
condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight
skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and
strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to
come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent
chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his
eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had
calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a
telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety
and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases
seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and
endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore
strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some
organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance.
Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the
welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape
wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and
open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain
the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of
the fishery. “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.”
By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which
arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far
more dangerous comrade than a coward.
“Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as careful a man as you’ll find
anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall ere long see what that word “careful” precisely means
when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.
Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply
useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought,
perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the
ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy
for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much
persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales
for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so
killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father’s? Where, in the bottomless
deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?
With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain superstitiousness, as has
been said; the courage of this Starbuck which could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed
have been extreme. But it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with
90
such terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these things
should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances,
would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be,
it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally
abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational
horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.
But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete abasement of poor
Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful,
nay shocking, to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock�companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and
meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing
creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their
costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it
remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the
undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat
of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed
investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that
democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great
God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine
equality!
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high
qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance
the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall
touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his
disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just spirit of
equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it,
thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale,
poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped
and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the
pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne!
Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from
the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
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27. Knights And Squires
Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local
usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking
perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of
the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year.
Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly
encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the
comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness
of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his
unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum
over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long
usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of
death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but,
if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a
good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves
there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily
trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the ground
with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that
thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the
regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his
bunk without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded,
stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them
all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them
again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into
his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his peculiar disposition;
for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the
nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the
cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise,
against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of
disinfecting agent.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy
young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the
great Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of
point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to all
sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead
to anything like an apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his
poor opinion, the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat,
requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order
to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years’ voyage round
Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter’s nails are
divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They called him King-Post
on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could be well likened to the short, square timber
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known by that name in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side
timbers inserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those battering
seas.
Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men. They it was who
by universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand
order of battle in which Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the
whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with their long
keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were
flingers of javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is
always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides
him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the
assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy and
friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set down who the Pequod’s
harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected for his squire. But
Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of
Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of red men, which has
long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers.
In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean,
sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their
largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently proclaimed him an
inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great
New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no
longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the
wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the
infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would
almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this
wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second
mate’s squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage, with a lion�like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so
large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards
to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely
bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa,
Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for
many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what
manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe,
moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal
humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag
come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was
the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the
Pequod’s company, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand
men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though
pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as
with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces
employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because
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in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as
generously supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the
Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews
from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing
out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their
crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling,
but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the
Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but
each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel,
what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea,
and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s
grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little
Pip—he never did—oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s
forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time,
when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his
tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
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28. Ahab
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab.
The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the
contrary, they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued
from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but
commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto
unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if
any strange face were visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain,
now in the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened
at times by the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a
subtle energy I could not have before conceived of. But poorly could I withstand them, much
as in other moods I was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish
prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness—to call it
so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all
warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the
crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant�ship companies which my previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed
this—and rightly ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild
Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the
aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to
allay these colorless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness in every
presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own
different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out
her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it
to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually
leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those
less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair
wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy
rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled
my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension;
Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He
looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the
limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged
robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey
hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it
disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled
that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the
upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and
grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still
greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar
left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout
the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego’s
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senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was
full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the
fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed
inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who,
having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab.
Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old
Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously
contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out—which
might hardly come to pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the
dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which
streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing
grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously
come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm
whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but
like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver
of ’em.”
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod’s quarter
deck, and pretty close to the mizen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch
or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a
shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow.
There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the
fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly
showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And
not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all
the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he
was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory
stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to
grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed
from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded.
And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all
that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as
another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly
all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there
was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for
that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds
choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather
we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked,
dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest,
ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to
welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful
allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look,
which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
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