Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale
Author: J.D. Livingstone
Date: 2012-10-09 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Horror
Description: Ishmael was raging after zombies killed his wife and child. He became a legendary member of the reviled Militia, fighting the undead horde that had begun to lurch out of California three years earlier. Laudanum helped blunt the pain of what he had seen and done, and from what he had yet to do. Finally, bone-weary and spent after completing that last horrible task, Ishmael wallows in the November of his soul. He flees the plaguey land to ship aboard the ill-fated Pequod, ruled by mad dismasted Captain Ahab. Fedallah, ancient Parsee mystic and zomby master, shares arcane knowledge with Ahab in t
Publisher: Memento Mori Press

What Lies Within

Loomings
Rucksack
Sober Cannibal
The Counterpane
Breakfast
The Street
A Bosom Friend
Queequeg
Backspatter
Nantucket
The Ship
Queequeg's Mark
The Prophet
Going Aboard
Merry Christmas
Bulkington
Dervish Dance
Knights and Squires
Ahab
Fiery Fey
Down, Dog!
All That Glitters
The Little Lower Layer
Soliloquies
Moby Dick
Hark!
Whale Charts
Dismasted
In the Shadow of the Moon
The Weavers
First Lowering
The Hyena
Subordinate Phantoms
The Spirit Spout
Slouching from Santa Cruz
The Albatross
The Gam
Aloft & Alone
The Kraken
The Line
Stubb Kills a Whale
The Dart & the Crotch
Stubb's Supper
Eating Whale Brains
Zombology[1]
The Shark Massacre
From Whale to Oil
Infandous Deeds
Monkey Rope
Beheadings
The Jeroboam
On the Heads of Whales
Tashtego's Spermy Shroud
Ishmael Dreams
Pitchpoling
Whale Tails
The Grand Armada
Fast & Loose
The Rosebud
Ambergris
Added Ballast
The Castaway
An Affair of Oil
Asleep at the Tiller
Young Life’s Old Routine
The Doubloon
Cross Bones
Unhealing Wounds
Ahab and the Carpenter
Queequeg in his Coffin
Blood-Forged Steel
Fedallah's Prophecy
Smashing the Quadrant
The Cruellest Fangs
A Musket to the Head
The Needle
The Log & Line
Thus Falls Bulkington
Zomby Brothel
The Afterhold
A Coffin for a Life-Buoy
The Starboard Hand of Woe
So Man’s Seconds Tick
The Pequod Meets Rachel
From that Vast Height
The Delight
One Wee Drop
The Chase: First Day
The Chase: Second Day
The Chase:Third Day
Amniotic Sea

Zomby Dick

or

The Undead Whale

Herman Melville
&
JD Livingstone

Memento Mori Press
Chicago, USA

Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

Memento Mori Press edition 1.1, eBook

October, 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Memento Mori Press. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, portions thereof, and all images in any form whatsoever. For information, please contact us at MementoMoriPress.com

Cover and interior designed by Bookem Danno Design, LLC
cover art: The Chase: Third Day, by Sinisa Banovic.

Interior heading and folio font is Cristoforo (Victorian Cthulu), by Thomas Phinney; its development funded in small part by Memento Mori Press through Kickstarter.

Dedication font is “Zombified,” by Chad Savage: SinisterVisions.com

All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

Get fine art prints, clothes & other zombie swag at ZombyDick.com

ISBN 10: 1477604197
ISBN 13: 978-1477604199
ISBN (ebook): 978-0-9707512-0-1

A portion of the proceeds from this novel are donated annually to the Pacific Whale Foundation’s No Child Left Indoors program and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Learn more at “PacificWhale.org,” and “SeaShepherd.org.”

for my chelle

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote; the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of any who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide does the all-receptive ocean spread forth its whole plane of unimaginable terrors and wonderful new life adventures. From the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them:

Come hither broken hearted;
here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death;
here are wonders supernatural without dying for them.
Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!

Chapter

Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having grown weary in mind and spirit from endless bones-jarring slaughter of the undead, and having little or no money in my purse, and nothing whatsoever to interest me on shore—in point of fact, it was the opposite, for I needed away from the plaguey landed world—and so I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. Some may call me purser rigged and parish damned for boarding ship while so many shamble-men yet threatened the Union, but then they likely do not know my part in the last two years of fighting that undead host; judge me not too harshly, pray, ‘til you hear the whole of it. Go to sea I must.

Going to sea 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 bankrupt coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every furnace-bound, headless-corpse funeral I meet;[1] 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 lopping people’s heads off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for battle-axe and hatchet, 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 souls in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

[1]As final resting place, the undertaker’s pine box has been replaced by the wind-scattered ash cloud, attested by the stoked and smoking crematoria smelt all across the land.

Here now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, girded and guarded round by vigilantly manned, high new stone walls, their bulk broken only by wharves, as the breaks in reefs round Feegee isles—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves and cooled by breezes which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate this high-walled 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 round the town stand thousands upon thousands of mortals fixed in ocean reveries. Some high atop the walls, leaning out between the gaps in the crenelated stone parapets; some seated upon the pier-heads on the docks below those high walls; 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 landlubbers; of weekdays pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, almost like zombies themselves, 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, or do they, like me, seek escape from the horror that shuffles behind them? There is a desperate longing in these seaward looking faces.

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.

Any who hunts for zomby scalps knows that mindless ambulatory things also tend to wend their way downward, and a shuffling zomby will also start from the plaguey headwater of its spawning, and stumble towards the delta where freshwater meets the salt. Woe betide that philosopher in his reverie also traipsing seaward in his idyll, for if such a wayward daydreamer does not look to aught surrounding him, he shall indeed soon see that coast, but all unknowing, staring out from corpsey white eyes as he stumbles, rotting, to the sea.

But avast, there, Ishmael; back to happier stuff; there will be enough of that to come. We talk of water. Here then, 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? Up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke; deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hillside 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.

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 soul, with a healthy robust spirit in them, 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 and seen too often the rent lungs of others, 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. Mine own was now but a rag, for blood money such as I earned from zomby scalps brought in for bounty is quickly spent, the better to be quit of its residual guilt; and so, to board ship as passenger was not a course then open to me.

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 honourable 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 honour.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it’s all right; everybody else is one way or other served 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. And aye, it must be said that it is no small thing to be safely afloat and relatively secure against any zomby menace; or such was my mistaken assumption at that time.

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 person enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim[1]), 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.

[1] The Pythagorean maxim is an injunction to avoid eating beans.

After having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor as a younger man; then a year of wedded bliss followed by two of utter hell; I now take it into my head and aching heart to go on a whaling voyage, a purposeful choice promising distraction and escape. 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.

Bloody Battle In Afghanistan.

Whaling Voyage By One Ishmael.

Massive Face-Eating Zomby
Infestation in Florida

I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage. Others were set down for heroic and 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 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.

Even had I not required succour from my blighted past, the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself would have pulled me to sea. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity and no little fear; but not the dreadful fear roused by the stinking shamble-men; no, the fear of the whale is a clean fear, and a cleansing one, or so I then dreamt in my naiveté.

Ah, the whale! In wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless wholesome perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds—far from any zomby—helped to sway me to my wish. With others, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, the torments of these two years past, and my long-felt itch for places remote; I say both these things rise and goad me to sea.

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, unless of course, said inmate carries a disease that drives him from his yeasty grave to feast on the living. None may be on intimate terms with such horrors—if you take my meaning—and remain in all ways hale and whole, and this a truth learned from long experience. It is said the sea is a healing presence, and so I hoped it would prove for one Ishmael.

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 and constant guilt that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a pestilential snow hill in the air.

Chapter 2

Rucksack

I stuffed a shirt or two, my hammock, and two heavy woolen blankets into my old rucksack, strapped it to my back, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the high-walled city of old Manhatto, axe in hand, I traveled alone, sleeping in safety, slung up high in stout oaks and burly maples. After only three mundane encounters with zombies,—all handily despatched—I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was 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. I prayed this would not lead to dire consequences as New Bedford is not so snug and safe as old Manhatto, for New Bedford has neither wherewithal nor inclination to build and man a great wall round the whole city. Nay, instead, fortifications here are a matter of individual investment, and so the many buildings having to do with wealthy whaling concerns are mightily fortified and apportioned with bristling brutes on their battlements; whereas those who cannot afford to lodge behind such walls have little chance of succor save by going about armed to the teeth.

There is an alertness to be seen in those who walk the New Bedford streets, despite the common knowledge that your average zomby cannot well abide the biting cold. Alas, fear is a special fever of the brain that takes no heed of outer climes, and this febrile fear now burns bright in every human breast even as the bitter snow flies and rivers are locked by ice.

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. New Bedford and those hardy Quakers residing upon the island needed no fortifications, for the zomby cannot swim, nor does he easily shuffle along the bottom as some believe.

When obtaining crewmen in such a redoubtable port, there is lesser likelihood that a zomby will accidently be shipped; some lightly bitten wight who has yet to turn feverish, die, and Quicken. 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 place where the first dead American whale was stranded.

Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Wampanoag, 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 cobblestones—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; doubly so when you see shambling threats lurking in every shadowy corner. I knew no one in the city.

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 and the threat from the west—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 “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, 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. Despite the peaceful quiet, I knew better than to let my guard desert me, cold or no; I stayed alert as a deer, tossing the smooth ash handle of Blackie back and forth between my hands, the activity warming me somewhat.

I at last came to a dim and less dangerous 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 connection, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say. 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, and finally the deplorable state of its outer zomby-proof door, 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. It makes a marvellous difference whether you look out at the wind from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether you observe it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and Death the only glazier.

True enough, thought I. 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 billion years ago. 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 that venerable Christian zomby, Lazarus? Can he warm his once-dead 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?[1]

[1]As previously touched upon, zombies care not for cold; less well known is that in winter they huddle together in stinking herds like slow-writhing balls of winter snakes in their slithery dens; in such frigid climes are they easily overcome.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.

Chapter 3

Sober Cannibal

Entering that gable-ended Spouter Inn, past the shabby zomby-proof door—yet still seeming more solid than all the rest of the building—you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. Despite the decrepitude of the establishment, it did ease a burdened mind to be inside and free of the need to cast one’s weary senses hither and yon in wariness.

On one side of the room hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights 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 could 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 icebound 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 agéd 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 marveled at what monstrous mayhem you could wreak, zomby-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifyingly wondrous implement.

A low whistle escaped me unbidden when I saw that many were no mere museum pieces hung here for the titillation of the tenants; these were functional; a sort of communal weaponry easily snatched from the wall, sharp as the tongue of a mother recently shorn of her children, by their look. None sported fresh ichor, but of stains there were plenty. Mixed with these shining weapons 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 afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found embedded in the hump.

Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way, 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, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. 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 villainous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass encircle 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 diverse 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 and frightfully unwalled 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 sailor 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 and muttered something about slowing down the undead with the cold, on account of you could never be too sure. Nothing lit the place 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 ain’t 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 he likes ‘em rare.”

“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”

“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.

I could not help it, but I began to feel 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 and instantly the room became tense, all hands grabbing weapons, but the noise was boisterous not monstrous and just as instantly all faces round the room lost their fearful cast. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; only a two years’ voyage; and a full ship in record time! 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—where the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round.

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. He frequently looked my way and seemed on the verge of approaching me but would not meet my eye, an often enough occurrence for those few who know me by reputation; and of late I look a sort of tough and shaggy myself. This man interested me at once for some unknown reason; There seemed a queer sort of familiarity about him; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate and the queerness eventually explained, 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 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 favourite with them, they raised a cry of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.

It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally 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.

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 any decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards unless—and here’s a rude thought—he has been waylaid and consumed. But barring that grisly demise—one I would not wish on even the most heinous of enemies no matter how many beds they may deprive me of—I say, suppose this harpooneer should tumble in upon me at midnight—how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming? Might I not start from sleep and hatchet off a limb or two before waking consciousness could stay my hand?

“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 can’t spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it’s a plaguey 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 draft 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! for though I am a large and somewhat stout specimen, I imagine any harpooneer worth his salt will be more so, and fiercer, too, perhaps.

Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that after all I might be cherishing 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 airley bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yes, he’s the bird what catches the worm. But tonight 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.”

“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozling 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 rather 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 connection, 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.”

“Well,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sermon for a chap what 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 the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string a onions.”

This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me, but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?

“Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”

“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 was spliced. There’s plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it’s an almighty big bed, that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and somehow Sam got pitched on the floor and came near breaking his arm. 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 if’n he ain’t got himself ‘et by one of them undead fellers, God forbid—come along then; do come; won’t ye come?”

At Coffin’s mention of his familial bed, as a roan from a rattlesnake my mind shied violently away from memories of our own large bed, hewn by my own hands. I paused, let out a pent-up breath, 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 and were the inn overrun, this stout bed would make a fine doorstop. 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. Curious, 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 looking-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 laid Blackie haft-up in the nearest corner, then 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 laid Little Blackie on the night stand near to hand, jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven.

I believed I was weary enough to finally sleep, but whether that mattress was stuffed with corncobs mixed with human teeth like Vander had collected, 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 nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a 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 wizened 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. 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 after all! thought I. 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 opening 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 top-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. How now, Ishmael? He is not some zomby, clearly; whence comes this fear? Thou art no coward, certain, but is it not when we feel safest, when we are on that pleasant floating verge of sleep, that we may be frightened most deeply?

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the second floor back. 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—though not so scared had he been a zomby in truth, but he clearly was not, strange though he was. In fact, 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 a near-casualty Polk’s War[1], and just escaped from the medic’s tent 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!

[1]The Mexican-American-Zomby war for control of western territories, 1846-1849. The appearance of the undead near the end of this conflict allowed the United States to recover from imminent defeat at the hands of Mexico and her Indian allies. As the zombies spread to warmer Mexican climes, those people—soldiers and señoritas alike— were overrun, for in that land of the chupacabra, there is no winter to slow the shamble-man’s inexorable advance. Thus did zombies deliver California to the United States.

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 colour 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 fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons.

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, 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 mannikin. 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 in 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 strangely fragrant 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!”

“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or damn-ee, I kill-ee!” again growled the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered hot 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 infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?”

“I thought ye know’d it; didn’t I tell ye, he was a-peddlin’ heads around town?—but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here—you sabbee me, I sabbee you—this man sleepee 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 the 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; mayhap more so. 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 wager you ain’t insured.”

This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me to get into bed—rolling over to one side as much as to say, “I won’t touch a leg of ye.”

“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”

I turned in, and slept a sweet dreamless sleep; for that horrid repeating nightmare stalking my sleep these past two years was entirely absent. What wonder that such a nothingness could be so blissful. O death!, where is thy sting?

Chapter

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 of his muscled limb was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured 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, 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.

At length, after some befuddled puzzlement at my present predicament, all the past night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. I lay still for a moment upon realizing that my dreams were, for the first time in over two years, not populated with diseased and stinking horrors that buried me with their numbers. I woke screaming not once all night. Could it have been the presence of this tattooed bedfellow that drove off those dreams as the giant hound drove wolves from Irish sheep? It did appear so, but be that as it may, I was now awake and began to feel more and more that this harpooneer’s arm across me was less and less a sort of comforter. I know not of what comely cannibal he dreamed, yet he held him or her tightly.

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 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 felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the comforter that was no comfort now, there lay the tomahawk, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. This Queequeg is even more careful than I, for my axe stands in the corner, ready to hand, but not so ready as this! 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 no small amount of loud, 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 that aforementioned wolfhound 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 my will to 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 by first donning his beaver top-hat, a very tall one, by the by, and then—still minus his trousers—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 manners. 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, and then his head! I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks and then his head, carefully avoiding the topknot. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers’s best cutlery[1] 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.

[1]Joseph Roger’s & Sons, a well-known cutlery company in New Sheffield, PA, produces the very finest knives, harpoons, and other useful edged weapons for the efficient slaughter of both whales and zombies.

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.

Chapter

Breakfast

Marveling again at the rest a full night of sleep free of dreams plagued by all that gore and guilt may provide, I clambered from the bed refreshed and readied for the coming day, descending afterward into the bar-room where I 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. A small penny to pay for dreamless sleep.

And still more: a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and in these times 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. Remember well that no zomby has ever been known to laugh, though he Quickened from the liveliest jester ever to catch the pestilence.

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.

What is more than passing strange was the truth that, being long at sea, none of these seamen had first hand knowledge of the zomby menace that had threatened us landlubbers these three years past. They had an easy, casual air about them that showed a relaxed countenance incapable of any man who had faced the unblinking stare of even one of the undead. Enough, Ishmael, I told myself; here comes the landlord, and breakfast should clear these cogitations from your countenance.

“Grub, ho!” 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 very 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 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, my Danish axe—Big Blackie by name—strapped within easy reach over my shoulder, its little brother, a hatchet of similar construction, a pleasantly grim weight at my hip.

Big Blackie has become a storied weapon among the Militia, and even beyond, and its design much copied; but the black axe and its smaller brother were the grand progenitors, quench-forged of high-carbon steel to my bidding, the design dreamt in a laudanum dream. Soon enough I hoped to lay them aside for my whaling voyage, and thereby be quit of them and all they betokened, but not ere I boarded whatever Nantucket-bound barque awaited.

When one walks about a town, even within a walled city or garden, if one would at the very least appear wise, one carries a weapon. In your walled Manhattoes you may see some dandies who choose to go out and about without protection, but these rare poltroons will soon subtract themselves from the world as penance for their foolishness; there is no telling from what quarter the zomby may come. Therefore, in my no small experience, I find it best to go out amply prepared. Hence the Danish axe at my back and the heavy hatchet at my hip, both in the style of the broad axe, that cleaver of cylinders, whether neck or tree.

The large curving blade of the Danish broad axe appears in the lower left panel of Ghiberti’s Portal Paradiso, wherein David slays Goliath. That very style of axe was trusted by no less a warrior than King Richard the Lionheart; and 300 years after the Lionheart’s reign, its broad blade was arcing down in the War of the Roses. At that war’s conclusion, its blade cleaved the traitorous head from the body of no less a noble than the Duke of Somerset. Aye, the Danish axe and traitors’ necks have long been on intimate terms. And as there is no greater traitor to all humanity than the zomby,[1] this broad axe of Danish make is the perfect weapon.

[1]Before the zomby menace, the Census Bureau in 1840 reported the Union to contain humans numbering 17 millions, and 3 millions more held as unwilling chattel, totalling 20 millions. The seventh census, completed in 1850, found that number to be 15 millions (by dint of their unflinching battle gainst the zomby host did all slaves win well-deserved freedom). Thus, by figuring also those who emigrated despite the zomby threat (some three millions), then by all accounting, we have so far lost 8 million souls to the zombies!

Some among the learnéd have calculated that, had this been a more populous and therefore more densely settled land, the zombies would have been nigh-unstoppable and overrun the entire country in short order.

You may keep your pistol and ball, you may keep your blunderbuss and musket, for though those may be powerful weapons, yet they are awkward, work little or not at all in the damp, and require no small amount of time to load and maintain. Keep them, I say, and I shall cleave to my axe, for it works well in rain or shine—indeed, even under water—and requires neither powder nor ball, nor time to reload; time that, in the heat of battle, cannot be bought for all the gold in all the deep-dug coffers of kings.

The Dane axe, when fastened to a stout haft of ash or hickory is wielded as a two-handed weapon, for its head is heavy, though not, perhaps, as heavy as the heart of him who wields it; and just as with a heavy heart, the Dane axe requires some strength to lift and bring to bear. Its weighty nature does not brook the use of a shield, a useless tool against a slavering brute at any rate. Your Dane axe is a tool for quick despatch, and with it one may instantly overwhelm even the stoutest, freshest zomby who may have been a strapping youth before Quickening.

But take care, friend, take care. For though I come off cavalier, this axe requires no small skill to wield. The neophyte, even were he able to swing the axe properly, will seek to use the blade—that sharp silvered crescent—and upon the first swing to a zomby skull, the blade is like to stick in bone and he will at once be overcome and his flesh consumed. Nay, I bid you save the blade and use the bashing side; strive not to decapitate, for it takes uncommon strength and skill to sever a head from its body, and more so when that body desperately grapples for your own.

The head of Big Blackie is heavier than tradition requires of the Dane axe, for its butt or poll—that part of the axe-head lying directly opposite the blade—I say, the poll is not a thin and elegant thing, nor does it sport another blade or spear as some Danish war axes do. Nay, the poll of Ol’ Blackie is stout and heavy, as the poll of a felling axe, but with its edges grounded roundish, the easier to pull the poll from a stove-in zomby skull. This design came to me in the depths of a laudanum dream, much as Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome came to Coleridge in his own opiate stupor.

The haft of Big Blackie is an even five feet of clear-grained white ash from an ancient tree, old when none but native blood lived in this land, a tree with rings so tightly packed it takes a scrying glass to see the grain. And in one of many connections between the Militia and the fishery,—that is to say, whaling—it is white ash that is used for whaleboat oars; its strength and flexibility are unparalleled.

“But hold there, Ishmael,” your axe-master might now be saying. “Such length in an axe haft is a hindrance; it is much too lengthy.” And Ishmael replies that this is true if you would hew a log for your cabin, but in the contest against a raving shamble-man it is distance you want, and distance you need, for would you come within the grasp of those upraised hands, your flesh will be forfeit, and you will wish you had a longer haft, I assure you. I am not a small man, nor unaccustomed to swinging an axe for days on end, and so this long-hafted axe is a perfect match to me for all my height and brawn. Does not a smaller man of necessity wield a shorter shaft?

But enough, Ishmael, thou blatherer, enough; thy breakfast needs settling. I unbuttoned the clasp about the head of Little Blackie, checked the clever catch that allows me to snatch Big Blackie quickly from my back, and all is as it should be. The streets of New Bedford lay waiting.

Chapter

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 and yet there is a greater danger, for such diversity and strangeness also makes the spotting of zombies a greater challenge to those less cosmopolitan, and a source of tragedy.

But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery, or like me awash in grief and seeking safe passage elsewhere. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests and zombies alike, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. I say, to them “Look to your axe, my hearties and drop it not so quick, as you may yet have need of it before shipping. Aye, and mayhap after, too.” 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 top-hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak. Unblooded all, I wager.

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 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, garrisoned houses; nor walled parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came these fortifications round such wondrous houses? how were planted gardens upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?

Go and gaze upon those emblematical yet functional harpoons festooning the high stone walls round yonder lofty mansion and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens behind their stout walls came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a 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 times past, prior to the presence of zombies, the town was sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of green and gold and not a high harpoon-bedecked wall to be seen. 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.

But now it is not summer, and there are high foreboding walls aplenty, and the trees are bare and the wind biting and the looks of the men on the street—and aye, the women too—are both wary and weary, with a hunted and a haunted appearance about them. Mayhap these good people have cleaved or burned a zomby corpse this very week, or even set a blunderbuss against their shoulder and with a flash in the pan and a jolt to the shoulder, blasted a zomby head from its diseased shoulders, and in all likelihood, that zomby was once one they knew, and likely even loved. Such an act changes one, for though the zomby is no longer human, yet it wears a human form, and though its blood is black instead of healthy red, to take even the semblance of life from a creature once loved, now loathed...ah! it is a burdensome thing for all its necessity; and that burden tends to show about the eyes a bit.

Chapter

A Bosom Friend

On my slow ambulation back from perusing New Bedford’s streets, I came upon Queequeg standing in front of one of the aforementioned overstocked coffin warehouses; he having also left the Spouter for a post-breakfast constitutional. Queequeg had a wonderingly pensive look on his tattooed face, but brightened upon sighting me. We nodded friendly greeting, and he made me know that he desired more information regarding these “canoes,” as he called them. I explained as best I could that before the zomby plague and the need to incinerate bodies, whalemen who died in New Bedford were laid to rest in coffins. He seemed to understand well enough, for he nodded, looking well-pleased and, turning, gazed again at the coffins for some time in silence. I felt a cold shiver run through me and motioned him to walk on with me, for Heaven’s sake. With a bemused glance at my consternation, he nodded and fell in beside me and we strolled on towards the Spouter Inn.

Ensconced back at the inn, we sat on a bench before the fire, our feet on the stove hearth. In Queequeg’s hand was that little idol of his; Queequeg held it close and peered hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, hummed to himself.

He presently 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; many a writer has shared the selfsame sentiment as Queequeg then felt.

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, undead or otherwise. 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, nor would have one. 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 on the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself.

As I sat there in that now lonely room, heart still sore heavy and no distractions from its ponderous weight; 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 and my own inner storm yet brewing; I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. A little less were my splintered heart and maddened hand 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 he proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging fragrant 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 not-so-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 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. It was a small thing; I had done much worse before, many times over, in fact. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salaamed 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. I then told Queequeg much of what you shall learn herein, but not all, for there are limits to shared heartache, even if the one to whom you talk understands but little; still, Queequeg listened and though he likely knew only one word in twenty, he thereby unjudgingly consoled me as I wept and wailed the parts of my tale I could then recall.

Once the vast bulk of that pent-up grief and loss had been vomited from me and my shame laid bare, if only to myself, I slowly recovered for the nonce. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair. We lay 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 kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors, a chill to stall the swiftest zomby; indeed it was chilly 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 save your heart, 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 one can ever feel their own identity aright except one’s 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, for in every dark crevice lurked some horrid thing, that, should my guard waver, would come for me.

And so I did not 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 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 pungent smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.

That undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, and he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, and mayhap give return payment for the attentive ear he gave my own grief, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.

Chapter

Queequeg

Kokovoko was Queequeg’s home, 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 mother, as was the strange custom of his people, was a High Chief, a Queen; his aunt a High Priestess; and on the paternal side he boasted both father and uncles who were unconquerable warrior-consorts. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth. How strange, thought I, to feel no small love for this cannibal of living flesh, so very different from that other shambling cannibal with its upraised arms; the life and mind within is the thing.

A Sag Harbor ship had visited his mother’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage on it to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the Queen his mother’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 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 his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.

In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a Queen and a Warrior, 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. 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 mother’s heathen subjects. 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, and then learning of the pestilence abroad in this land, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians and none more so than this plaguey land of whites; I’ll die a pagan.

By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, finding a queen of his own and having a coronation; since he might now consider his mother dead and gone, she 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 to the royalty of the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan consorts of Queens before him. But by and by, he said he would return, as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of the warrior’s scepter now.

I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his own vocation. He seemed to know but hearsay regarding the zomby plague, for he had been longer at sea than on land these ten years past, and when I spoke to him of zombies he either little understood or but little believed me. Deciding it was vain to attempt further explanation, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket. 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 no stranger to killing, yet 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 and for the second night in as many years, what dreams I had remained submerged in the blesséd forgetting depths of the little death that reaps us anew each night.

Chapter

Backspatter

Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber for a wig stand, I settled my own and my comrade’s bill; using, however, Queequeg’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 rucksack 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 and, being long and stout and sharp, of great use against zombies, or so he thought. In short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers’ meadows either to reap or defend their families armed with their own scythes—though in no wise obliged to furnish them—even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.[1]

[1]A sharp harpoon might make a decent razor but it is frightfully inefficient gainst the zomby. Indeed, a harpoon would be a great handicap, for its barby purpose is to hold fast, whereas the efficient zomby weapon deals its damage, is swiftly retrieved so as to deal that damage anon with alacrity, till all zombies are down and done in. Heed me well, ye many tyro whalemen in the zomby battle; however storied and ennobled is the harpoon, there are better weapons than this for zomby slaughter, as you shall soon learn.

Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story. The people of his island of Kokovoko, 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 Kokovoko, 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 honour, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the Queen, Queequeg’s mother. 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 Priestess opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping her consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priestess, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being a man and Captain of a ship—as having plain precedence over a mere island Priestess, even in the Queen’s own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. “Now,” said Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our people laugh?”

Before I could chuckle my affirmation, my eye beheld a motion just beyond Queequeg, a means of moving I would fain forget, that awful shuffling lumber of the shamble-man, silent but for his dragging feet; now surprisingly close, it hissingly moaned its vile hunger, reaching out with pale hands.

Against all training, I froze, for Queequeg’s presence had lulled me into a state of relaxed happiness I had not experienced for more than two years. Queequeg however, hesitated only a fraction of an eyeblink before hurling his harpoon at the monster. The barb, with a horrible meaty chunking sound, entered the thing’s chest, just right of center, and only I knew the blow to be imperfect; for that foul heart did not beat. I saw Queequeg relax, thinking the matter closed, but the zomby staggered back two steps then staggered forward, driven in part by the harpoon’s heft, canting him forward. It was only steps away. Believing the creature killed after he sent his harpoon through it’s heart, Queequeg’s unknowing would be his doom. It was this that goaded me to action.

I let forth a hot curse, finally unfreezing, and in one long-practiced motion, advanced three quick steps, simultaneously snatching my axe from my back and bringing it to bear, all in one fluid maneuver.

Queequeg would have been grasped and bitten had I not darted past him. The thing groaned and grimaced; I cursed my lapse even as I swung, for had I not been so keenly absorbed in Queequeg’s story and our new friendship, I would have heard the Satan-spawn sooner. In fact, one or both of our lives would have been forfeit had the weather been warmer, for the frozen air did slow the creature somewhat.

But all these are hindsight words; then there was no thought but movement, the axe-head arcing downward to bring the blunt smashing butt against the monster’s skull-bones; my grasp on the haft sliding smooth and strong to the haft’s end as I brought the axe to its full extension. With a crunch and a sickening splatter of gore, the zomby crumpled. It was what we in the Militia called a soloist, as it acted alone. I was conscious of my unprotected state, and so, one eyeblink before the poll connected, my eyes and mouth snapped shut, fast as a bothered clam; for without the cinder goggles and the protective cloth mask commonly used for such work, risk of contracting the vile plague was a grave danger, so to speak. I could only hope no ichor had spattered my new friend in the eye or mouth. All was now still, the street quiet as death, and snow began to silently fall.

Queequeg stood as one struck dumb and looked with widened eyes first to me, and then my axe, and then rested long on the crumpled gray-faced form, smartly dressed, oozing black blood and pale brains upon the cobbles. Finally Queequeg jerked like one started from sleep to waking; he came to me and laying his brown tattooed hands on my shaking arms, he gently made me to lower my axe and, taking it, wiped the ichor from its poll on the zomby’s tailored suit before handing it back to me and retrieving his harpoon.

When Big Blackie was sheathed once more on my back, Queequeg took my shoulders, looked me long in the eye and wordless touched his forehead to mine, his eyes locked to my eyes the while. Soon my enraged shaking stilled. Queequeg, waving me off the wheelbarrow, pantomimed for me to watch our backsides, and so we continued on towards the wharf, my every sense now alert and singing and that aching fury, a passion I desired so vehemently to quench and quit, and yet here it hotly throbbed unabated, and I ground my teeth and vowed anew to get me to sea in all haste. We spoke no more, for all laughter had left us.

At last, we arrived at the wharf, Queequeg marveling at the fit of his fine new calfskin boots, taken from the zomby’s corpse. We completed the distasteful and shockingly indiscreet screening procedure—for the isle of Nantucket is as clean a refuge as conscientious Quakers can make it—passage paid and luggage safely stowed, we at last, somewhat more rumpled than before, 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 and its undead dangers!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs and the stumbling, bumbling zomby; and with a deeply felt sigh, turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea, which will permit no records.

At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So 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. 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 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, and with a long living arc, leapt into the deep frigid waves. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like I had never before witnessed, 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.”

Chapter

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 (and secure!) 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 snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their 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 and for all its sand and lack of grass there is also that which it lacks that Illinois has in abundance, and those not so pleasant and harmless a thing as grass, if you take my meaning.

What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers 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 Bering’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 Himmalayan, 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, and the whalemen his poorly paid slaves. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at 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 and beyond all reach of upraised grasping arms, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

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 crooked directions he had given us 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; contemplating casket warehouses with Queequeg; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?[1]

[1]Tophet: A name for Hell, derived from a burning rubbish heap in the Valley of Hinnom south of Jerusalem that gave rise to the idea of a fiery Gehenna of judgment. In that loathsome valley, as in all towns today, fires burned perpetually to consume the corpses heaved upon the flames.

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 past a door that—curious and alarming to me—had no zomby latch whatsoever, such was that isle’s safety. She then showed 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.

“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 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 “cod for two!” with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury 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?

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders; you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. 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 voy’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.” She then eyed me up and down with a baleful look that seemed to say, “Them axes best stay in their sheaths,” but after a long pause, she said instead, “So. 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.”

We retired to our room, a bed apiece no less! and with Queequeg near and all the cold Atlantic betwixt the diseased shore and my bequilted bed, I slept the astoundingly undisturbed sleep of a chowder-suckled newborn babe.

Chapter

The Ship

In our beds we concocted our plans for the morrow. 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, though I but recently have begun to suspect Yojo’s designs may reach well beyond Queequeg’s well-being.

Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied upon Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler 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. The name Devil-dam struck too close to my recent past for comfort; 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 pried desultorily about the Devil-dam, unimpressed; 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;—square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. 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 Becket bled.

But to all 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 both of material and device, unmatched by anything afloat.

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 out 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 the top-knot on Queequeg’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 art no Nantucketer—ever been in a stove boat?”

“No, Sir, I never have, though I have stove in many a zomby skull.”

The elderly man turned a quizzical eye toward me in a brief moment of silence; only once did I hear him mention or acknowledge aught of zombies. He blustered on, ignoring my statement.

“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—”

“Marchant 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 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? Thou art not infected, art thou?” this last with such a dark and thunderous scowl to give any brave man pause.

I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard.

“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, one that prophecies say can not be killed by man!—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.”

“‘Tweren’t an accident, ah no, would that it were. But book ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see; thou dost not talk shark a bit. Sure ye can handle a sharp tool? Sure ye’ve been to sea before now; sure of that?”

“Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you, I earned a reputation in the zomby war, and 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.”

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.”

The grizzled old salt nodded. “Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where you stand?”

I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would, for it seemed then my only solace, my only escape from that former life; and the Pequod was as good a ship as any—I thought the best—and all this—save my thoughts of escaping my shame—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 secondarily 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.

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his pantaloons. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders lest they be zombies; 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[1] of leviathan gore, and no doubt had he been hale and healthy would he have gladly spilled zomby ichor in equal amounts.

[1]Tun: a large barrel holding 252 gallons.

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 overmuch, 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 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 at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely 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 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.

“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 net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years’ beef and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver.[1]

[1]This is one of many similarities the fishery shares with the Militia, for though it disgust some, we do clothe ourselves with whatever unspoilt attire can be acquired from despatched zombies, as Queequeg’s new boots attested. This necessary pilfering does contribute some to the general shunning of the Militia by the regular population, despite the vital service we render. We in the Militia have a saying: The cold wind cares not whence thy clothes were got.

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 quill pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth—“

“Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what lay shall we give this young man?”

“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it?—‘Where moth and rust do corrupt, but lay—’”

Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one, shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed; and though from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.

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

“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-coloured 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.

“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. Anyhow, 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 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 deign to lick his foul 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. 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 boychild: 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.

Chapter

Queequeg's Mark

We left the savory air of the Try Pots to make our way to the wharf, picking our teeth with halibut bones from the breakfast chowder now warming our bellies. As we neared 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 Queequeg standing on the wharf, unconcerned but watchful.

“I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”

“Yes,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from behind Peleg’s, out of the wigwam. “He must show that he’s converted. Son of darkness,” he added, turning to Queequeg, “art thou at present in communion with any Christian church?”

“Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the 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 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 no ways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands.”

“Splice, thou mean’st splice hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer. “Young man, you’d better ship for a 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?”

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 quickly bracing his left knee in the clumsy cleat[1] and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—

[1]A semi-circular, thigh-sized cut made in the boards at the bow of a whaleboat. Used by harpooneers to steady themselves when darting the iron.

“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- eye; why, dat 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 Queequeg and said, “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 Zomby Day of Judgment is 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 ever 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,” Peleg said. “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ‘em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who ain’t pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the church, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguey 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 off 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,—“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. 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.”

Chapter

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; his left arm hung limp and palsied at his side.

“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 good arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his prodigious 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?”

“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 ye heard nothing about the silver calabash, nor his taking a lightning bolt off Cape Horn, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly scrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa Croce as a young man?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the golden coin? And nothing about the truth of his lost his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy; nor nothing on the missing cabin boy, I’ll wager.

“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 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; they know not the rest. None do, I tell ye. Well now, that ain’t entirely true I s’pose. That Parsee, he knows it.”

“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 won’t be, after all. Anyhow, it’s all fixed and arranged a’ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any 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 to keep mum on it.”

“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 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 how; and Santa Cruz; and the Cape Horn fit; 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.

Chapter

Going Aboard

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.

Whaling necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, bankers, and—most important to me—all bellowing shamble-men. 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.

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 captain’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.

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, venturing out in the thick and chilly morning mist.

It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect foggy dawn when we drew nigh the wharf. In the swirling mist ahead was vague, shambling movement that instantly startled the dregs of sleep from me, for it seemed to be that lurching gait I knew too well. I reached back instinctively for the haft of Big Blackie to bring it to bear, but found only empty air; I had left it with Mrs. Hussey for safekeeping while I went a-whaling, for I supposed I would not need it aboard the Pequod. Too late now, Ishmael, thought I; pray Little Blackie will suffice and get on with it. I unclasped its sheath to draw it forth. However, the figures had moved on, and my fear left as quickly as it came and I judged it a phantom self-created,—and not the first of its ilk—for the mind long besieged has been known to see phantoms where none exist.

“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 dawn light, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.

“Going aboard?”

“Hands off, will you,” said I.

“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ‘way!”

“Ain’t going aboard, then?”

“Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?”

“No, no, no; I wasn’t 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 figures; 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;—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-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 good 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 Queen, 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 yet soothed his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The strong hempen vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes.

“Holloa!” he breathed at last, “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.

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.

Chapter

Merry Christmas

At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her 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 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 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 merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot.

But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.

“Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive ’em aft.”

“Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.

“Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next command, and the crew sprang for the handspikes.

Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots of the port—he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft—Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a 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’s hymnal in each seaman’s berth.

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, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!” And so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while 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 zomby-free haven in store on the coming voyage; and meads and glades so eternally vernal and free of disease, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer. Ah, what sweetness does sometimes lie in error.

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.”

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 percent 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.

Chapter

Bulkington

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn where he eyed me with trepidation—or so it seemed to me—and him both a stranger and yet a queer sort of familiar. 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, at least not for 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 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!

Ahab’s Log: Chapter

Dervish Dance

In such manner as will become clear ere this tale’s ending, I, Ishmael, came into possession of the ship’s log of the Pequod, penned by the scripturient hand of Ahab himself. Even I who saw—nay, lived through!—what transpired; upon reading the truth of Ahab’s tale, even my own assumed intimate understanding transformed beyond all reckoning; I am not shamed to say I wept to learn of it, once the rage had passed.

On the whole, Ahab’s log was filled to overflowing with the most mundane material, that stuff deemed routine on a whaling voyage: headings, weather, casks stowed, wonders seen, and boats stove, but oh! to be sure, therein were also page upon page of frantically scratched ravings; frenetic letters packed back to back tighter than the hold of the Pequod; all part and parcel of Ahab’s one-pointed purpose. It beggars the imagination to attempt a reading, and many long months did I spend pondering the tomes in puzzled amazement.

The majority of Ahab’s log will be useless and arcane to all others but a ship’s captain, or an inmate of Bethlem; these entries I do not include for they bewilder rather than clarify. But ah! in those rare entries wherein Ahab bares his very soul, those entries wherein Ahab’s mad quest and its lofty loathsome purpose fairly leaps from the page to seize your windpipe; from these entries you will shudder to learn the truth of Ahab’s madness, and more besides.

Ahab’s Log: December 25, 1850

Jove blast thee, winter! These hands become claws and this brain is but a sluggard thing and yet thy fever rages, Ahab, aye, rages afresh on every waking day, fed by portents and omens read in every scudding cloud and phrensied wave. Damn this winter and damn this Christmas Day; damn this icy clime; how these withered thews do creak with the cold!

Stoke thy inner fire, Ahab, for with it thou must do battle gainst that paralyzing cold seeping into thy backbones from without, and that other cold that even now slithers its tendrils up that same backbone here within this sack of skin, thy body. Thy body? ‘Tis thine no longer, old man. A purpose works within thee, for did it not, thou wouldst even now be fronting a raging fire with thy son and loving wife, thy feet on the hearth to ease this thickened ache that slithers up thy centermost keel. To move at all is an agony of shrieking tendon. Would that unblinking Ahab could lie insensate as the whaleboat crew, all save unsleeping, indispensable Fedallah, there brewing his bitter beverage; its heat seeming its sole redeeming quality. But hard down on thy weakness, Ahab! Thou needest not sleep, thou needest thy due, no more! The fever burns in thee and the bitter potion dost unlimber thy bones somewhat, so thou canst pace and better plot the demise of Moby Dick!

Damnable whale; I shall find thee and rend thee and feast on thy flesh and bathe in thy blood and dance a whirling dervish dance in thy blackened entrails! I swear! I swear! I swear! that naught will keep Ahab from thee, demon whale! Neither the freezing fires of hell nor the burning cold overtaking this flesh; not one whit shall aught under sun or stars or the blasted shadow of the moon hinder Ahab in this one purpose, nigh-equal parts foul and noble!

Nigh-equal? Hast not that balance shifted; shifted to show more of darkness than light? Dost not hear that shifty ballast close to hand there, whimpering in the afterhold, rolling about in drugged stupor? It needs must be so! says Fedallah. So be it, and damn the consequence. Ye fightest a greater battle, old man; and thy cause and quest is more than equal to that one wasted life; aye, thy purpose is more than worthy of that sacrifice and much else besides if needs be. Such a price will be willingly paid by thee if not by others.

Aye, those two more tick-marks ‘gainst Ahab’s curséd soul now lie there just below, in the cleverly concealed Captain’s hold Fedallah hast crafted to hide his men, and that thing—bedamned ingredient—and that other, future ingredient, bound and gagged and sleeping his laudanum sleep. The Quaker’s own John White Webster, only more vile, for his sin is yet more unspeakable.

Hist! Hear the struggles and turgid moans, a faint and feeble sound that yet knocks so loud in Ahab’s ears and pounds on his thrice-damned mind with the concussion of a million lunatic timpanists pounding out of time. Hist! How do ye but hear it, Ahab, and not give in to raving? Ye do not. Ye can not. Ye will not. Aye, for will’s the thing. Iron will. Steely will. It shall be thy boon and thy brawn ere the bitter end of him I hate.

Fedallah, his demon-like crew, and mine own crippled corpus slunk aboard the Pequod under cover of morning fog like the damned slinking from Eden; but belay that!—for never was such a paradise part of Ahab’s ken, nor wast his to lose; more apt is it that thou hast moved within the centermost ring of Dante’s devising, Ahab—aye, slinking not from a garden paradise, but from one stinking pit to another yet more vile and deeper and damning.

The whale. Ever yon blasted, shitting whale. Prepare thyself, thou foul beast, for the Pequod hast weighed anchor and even now pitches its prow toward thy deep abode at last. Ahab comes for thee, Moby Dick!

Chapter

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 the hop-heavy bottled ale bound for old Bombay. 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; he was no leptosome. 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. Though perhaps overly punctilious, he would have made a fine Militia man.

“Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck 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 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.

That hundreds of men had been so killed by whales and gravelessly buried at sea 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 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 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 one 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 valour 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 humanity 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.

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 easy-going, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs and their headless dead; 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 now, in this time of plague, 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 honour with him to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and 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 known by that name in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those battering seas.

Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahab would 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, a pure-blood Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of First Peoples, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers and whose doughty people, despite their dwindling numbers were yet foremost in wiping the zomby plague from that brawny arm of Massachusetts. 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—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 moose nor wilder zombies 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 African, with a lion-like tread. 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 vast 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 African 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 African, 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; only in the Militia, to my knowledge, is there a more egalitarian distribution of duties. It is my own belief that this arrangement in the Militia is but a reflection of the truth that neither the plague nor Death itself discriminates as does so-called polite society.

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, a 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 would ever come back. 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 and a Shammy[1] here, hailed a hero there!

[1]Samuel William Henry Ireland (1775-1835) was a prodigious forger of Shakespeare memorabilia. In the Militia, a “Sammy Ireland,” or a “Shammy,”—as in the usage of “sham” and its phonemic proximity to “shamble-man”—is one who believes himself a zomby and acts accordingly, though he is not in any way infected. More will be told of this dangerously sad malady at the proper time.

Chapter

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. 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. And yet for all the ferocity of the Pequod’s crew, I nonetheless felt safer than ever I had since that dream-like idyll of three years past, now seeming entirely too fantastical for the waking world.

It was the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to allay my colourless 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, and 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, nor 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 Pukwudgie, 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, no 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, ostentiferious 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 by a pang of misgiving at the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch 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 and when he first stumped his way below I started and drew quick breath, for his walk had a lurching gait, so like that of a zomby that my right hand, of its own accord, began to reach for the axe that was no longer at my back. With pounding heart did I realize Ahab’s ivory leg had lent him a shamble-man’s gait and it took the full length of the watch before I could calm myself. Come now, Ishmael, I reasoned, no zomby has the capacity to captain a ship, surely.

After that morning, Ahab 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 with that disturbing lurching motion to which—O wise intuition!—I never entirely grew accustomed. As the sky became 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 deathly cold, wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And by and by, he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. The Pequod was only making a passage, not regularly cruising; there was little or nothing 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.

Chapter

Fiery Fey

During the more pleasant weather, in due rotation with the other seamen, my first mast-head came round. In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial even—then her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.

The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant at the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor, for so high above the deck are you perched that no zomby could reach you even if he would. For these reasons and more, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplace slaughters never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic plagues; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable; and above all these pleasantries is the comfortingly absolute knowledge that you will not be dinner.

In one of those southern whaleships, on a long three or four years’ voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the
t’gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problems of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head.[1] Beware of such a one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth and its disease, and seeking sentiment and security of a sort in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”

[1]Phaedon (1776): a book by the Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786); a defense of immortality.

The New American Practical Navigator (1802): written by mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1868), considered foundational for maritime navigation, and carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel.

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such a laudanum-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wycliffe’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

And so it was that there, aloft and swaying, far enough removed by time and tide for my addled mind to begin to unswallow itself from the blackness that had overtaken me; I say, there in the t’gallant cross-trees did my past come to engulf me. And, as many stories do, mine came back to me with a song.

Far below my perch atop the mast head, those not on duty lounged about on the forward deck, singing popular songs of minstrelsy. One particular song came floating up to carry me where I would not go of my own accord. Instead of the rough voices of my shipmates, though it was my own voice I heard, my own made-up lyrics inserted, happily singing to my sweet Lilith, not two days before she was lost from me for ever; my heart bursts; tears fall from off my cheek, and drift to windward to melt into the sea, salt to salt, silent as snow falling on a mountain lake, unheeded by the singers on the deck nearby. Ah, Lilith, my fiery Fey![1]

[1]This tale of my time prior to shipping aboard The Pequod is but a sketch by a fingerless man, for many of those terrible events had left only a vast blasted nothing in their wake; in that place where memories should reside there is only blankness, as on the edges of a map where bold letters decry, “Here be Dragons!” Such memories as did return appear herein, yet are they presented higgledy piggledy, for this is how they came back to me. There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Oh___I went down South for to see my Lilly

Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day

My Lilly, she be a spunky filly

Singing Polly wolly doodle all the day

Fare thee well, fare thee well,

Fare thee well my fiery Fey

For I’m off to Old Virginny for to see my darling Lilly

Singing Polly wolly doodle all the day

Oh, my Lil, she be a maiden fair

Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day

With the curly eyes and the laughing hair

Singing Polly wolly doodle all the day

Behind the barn, down on her knees

Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day

I gave her such a mighty....

“Stop, stop, stop, silly man. You sing a tune fit to kill the cow,” Lilith laughed, then in a fierce whisper. “Hush I say! Are ye daft, sweet bully-trap? You’ll wake Gennie, and if already awake I’d not have the child hear your delightfully filthy ditty. On my knees indeed! What’s a girl to think?” She dragged me into the next room, shutting the door gently behind her. “I ought to give you my bunch of fives; don’t think I won’t” she said, balling her pretty fists and striking an impressive pugilistic stance. “Aye, a proper anointing I’ll give ye; I’ll nobble ye. And you got the words all arsey-versey besides! Tis not ‘fiery Fey,’ tis ‘Fairy Fey. Ye take as many liberties with your ditty as you do with your lady.”

What one must know of Lil, first and foremost, is that she belies description, for being fair and slight and with curly reddish-golden hair, she is an obvious product of the Isle of Saints. She is beauty personified in flesh, and one would think that would she but open her pale lips, the sweetest honey might pour forth, but such is not the case, for she was sired by a seaman, whelped by a harlot—a bit of a bunter as Lilly calls her, which is to say half-whore and half-beggar—and raised near entire by motherly Awashonks, the Indian crone who taught her what she needed to know of the world and its workings.

Lil’s mother’s plans were for Lilly to be a high-dollar toffer, but Lil would have none of it and, at the tender age of eight, she ran off to the home of Awashonks, a long-time friend of her absent father. From then forward, she hung about the docks and learned to fend for herself, to fish, and to fight, and to curse like a sailor. On the docks Lilith learned to speak as a sailor does; such slang you never have heard, and a fouler mouth on a fairer face you never will experience; and yet for all that, her heart was pure enough. I will translate her puckering where I may.

“Lady? Lady?” said I, laughingly. “Cease thy obloquy, I beg of you, dearest. ‘Fairy Fey’ is but ignorant redundancy, for any who know aught of the Fair Folk knows they are also called Fey; to twice name them as the original tune does seems foolish. And besides, my tart, thou art fiery in both spirit and appearance, and so I changed my tune.” I reached out to draw her close but she batted my hand away coquettishly and not without some small and loving violence.

“Avast there! Stow thy manhandling attempts. I am sore worried about news I heard today. I took Gennie to town with me, to visit the apothecary, and I heard the town crier sing out dreadful news: zombies have been sighted not ten miles west! Ten miles, Ishmael! West!” This last because our cozy cottage lay in a forest clearing some two miles west of town.

“Hush love,” I said ignorantly, “Our doors are stout enough, and the axe is just outside the door there, and the kindling hatchet is within easy reach,” I said, nodding toward the woodpile by the fireplace. “From all I have heard, the zomby is slow and easily killed, nor can he easily enter through a door as stout as this; not even a horde could breach these stout timbers.” I slapped the round trunks of pale gold that made up our cabin walls; felled and fit together by my own hand. “No need to worry.”

She clearly did not share my sentiment. “At any rate,” she continued, “Before the town crier’s dire news I had been inquiring after Harriet’s health, for she looked a bit pale. I was soon distracted by Gennie’s wailing. She had been playing with the little Walker boy; you know him, little Johnny; Jacob and Harriet’s boy, a few months younger than Gennie, and usually such a sweet boy.

I nodded.

“Well, that little so-and-so up and bit our Gennie. He was mad! His mother,—she did look a little feverish herself, come to think on it—she pulled him off straightaway and made her apologies, but I near to kicked the little lad, he was that ferocious.”

“Now, now,” I said, in a tone meant to placate, “boys can be a tad rough, I know...”

“Do not attempt thy sly patronizings, Ishmael. I am well acquainted with the roughness of boys. I tell you, the boy was rabid! I had just pulled him off when...”

But before she could continue, we heard a rustling shuffle; my little girl, my Genevieve, my Gennie, not but two and a half summers old, stumbled from her small sleeping place in the corner of our room and pushed open the door to where Lil and I stood close by each other; one wee hand clutching her blanket to her chest and the other rubbing the sleep from green eyes like her mother’s, cheeks flushed from sleep and a slight fever. Such beauty and innocence a child holds! If not already broken, my heart would shatter upon this memory. It now seems no distance of time nor tide can fully take the ache from this heart. It was the last time ever I saw her who was the dearest daughter of my heart. I flee pell-mell from this memory.

It is too much to continue, for Gennie’s tiny trusting face unmans me and makes my breath catch and one violently stifled sob brings me back to myself, high atop the t’gallant cross-trees, swaying there, nigh-upon reeling. It is not possible for you, mortal Ishmael, to think on that time and grasp the joy without reaping the sorrow afresh, for those twain emotions have become unsunderable in thee; aye, they are now and forevermore one and the same in thy heart. Would that I could live only in that honeyed homey moment for ever and for aye, and never go on to those darker days of blood and gore and folly. Better to tell all I can of whales instead, and by that distraction avoid these lunacy-inducing reveries.

But ah!, that such a time when she and I and little she were so full of life and love and hope should fade thus! Slowly, so slowly does it go; and choiceless, I both grieve and rejoice for the fading of that Fey-like life.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. While this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Whether such a fatal plunge be blessing or curse in the case of one Ishmael, none can yet say. Heed that fearsome drop well, ye Pantheists!

Chapter

Down, Dog!

Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ‘twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.

Nor was Ahab alone in feeling the weather’s witchery, for it cast its indolent spell on my own heart. With the warmth and the riskless work, I did find some small solace aboard ship that I had all but forgotten in previous years. Youth returned, or so it seemed, and I slept deeply dreamless and felt some tiny inkling of slow recovery, as the first tingle of a sleep-numbed arm returning to life.

Old age however, is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth.”

So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the second mate, came up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.

“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.—Down, dog, and kennel!”

Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir.”

“Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.

“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a dog, sir.”

“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I’ll clear the world of thee!” As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.

“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know whether to go back and strike him, or—what’s that?—down here on my knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time I ever did pray. It’s queer; very queer; and he’s queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he’s about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!—his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there’s something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.

He ain’t in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that Dough-Boy, the steward—him whose whole life is one continual lip-quiver—didn’t he tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man’s hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! Well, well; I don’t know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it.

He’s full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that for, I should like to know? Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that queer, now? But there’s no telling, it’s the old game—

Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ‘em. But that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and Sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes for a snooze. But how’s that? didn’t he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that! I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out—but the only way’s to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I’ll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight.”

When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.

In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhal. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.

Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How now,” he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring—aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapours among mild white hairs, not among torn locks like mine. I’ll smoke no more—“

He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.

Ahab’s Log: Chapter

All That
Glitters

Ahab’s log: January 21, 1851

Y onder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy with its inner band of beaten iron a hammered nail from the very cross of the Crucifixion. And who is Christ but the most sanctified of zombies? That crown is bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ‘Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ‘Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass. Thank the sweet turning Earth and her sister Sun that we have sailed into such warmth to ease that deathlike clutch the cold hast spawned in thee, Ahab. Thy bones and sinew do fairly glow as the sun does glow; the warmth but illusion, yet one fair welcomed, for by its distant fire will thou keep thine own alit. But warmth be not enough, for we need speed, aye, and time, though both be but sides of the same tarnished coin. Ahab, wouldst thou sell thy soul for speed? Aye, indeed; but not one bent farthing wouldst thou get for such a wizened thing, for Ahab’s soul is near spent already. Ah, for time and tide and a fair wind with following seas!

Yon impertinent mate, one ginger-headed Stubb, hast pushed Ahab nigh the bursting point. Had that fool but one inkling of the peril with which he chivvies he would utter not one word more to Ahab. Fool! ‘Twas all Ahab could do to refrain from snatching the brains from out his skull. The smell of him! Such enticements! Fedallah warned thee, Ahab, and though ye somewhat heeded that sage advice and steeled thyself, yet how different it is to feel that foul hunger’s pull than to know that such a thing is in the offing. Blast and damnation! but we must kill a whale soon, for insatiable hungers surround this affair as sulphurous odors haunt the gates of Hell.

But stay thy hand, Ahab, and quench thy unholy thirst with that small draught of black-tar laudanum Fedallah hast prepared for thee; for there is a greater thirst of revenge to whet thy soul, lest ye forget it. Time will come, too soon, too soon, when yon laudanum-soaked villain in the aft hold will be sore used. Quench thy gnawsome hunger and rage. Curséd Stubb. Doomed Stubb! If thou hast more trouble from that one, mayhap he will join that living corpse in the after hold.

Remember thy lessons, Ahab, for ye are not some spindle-shanked schoolboy to forget his lessons ere they enter his head, though thou be half spindle-shanked indeed; but for the nonce, thy mind is yet thine own and wouldst thou keep it so until that dark elder day, thou need only harken back to those teachings Fedallah hast forced upon thee. Breathe deep, spindle-legged manikin, and calm thy raging heart lest ye take that necessary future step too soon. Control thy autonomy, man. Blink. Breathe and recall thy purpose; breathe and know that what ye attempt hast higher purpose. If thou finishest the deed, thou earnest redemption for thy past litanies of sin, those thou art this moment committing, and for those ye will yet commit. What sweeter word may there be than that? Redemption. ‘Tis honey to thine ears; salt to thy blood.

Time—indifferent taskmaster—and his ancient, luscious succubus Memory, they will not tarry for thee, Ahab. Therefore thou must thyself tarry not one whit lest ye be left in their fading wake. But breathe; just so, or mayhap deeper. Blink thine eye. But breathe deeper won’t ye, and blink again as ye think on how to further thy aim, how best to speed thy course. What might goad men’s souls to deepest waters, to unsleeping alacrity, to unswerving vigilance? What else but gold, Ahab. Aye! Gold indeed. Forgettist not how gold may goad those who have but little felt its glittery touch; forgettest not the truth that Sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

So. Take thy lucky coin from thy pocket and use its hefty bright inducement to raise the white whale the sooner. In that way may ye sooner strike him and kill him and harvest that which may yet put to rest this frightful zomby plague, the shame of which is thine, Ahab. Thine! Thy guilt is but a deservéd burden thou carryest upon thy bent old shoulders. It is thy burden to carry, and thy burden to dispense with, for is’t not true that thou art no longer human? and did not the squaw Tistig prophesy that monster could not be killed by mortal man? And that, that, is the only solace to be sucked from this sad circumstance.

Thou bury thyself in this hollow cabin, as a bear lives out the winter in its hollow tree, sucking its paws; so, in thy inclement, howling old age does thy shriveled soul, shut up in the caved trunk of thy body feed upon the sullen paws of thy gloom!

Aye, gold may raise the white whale the sooner. Ye brought but this one sixteen-dollar piece from far Ecuador, its luck sung into it by that sweet mestiza, Alma, so long ago! Feel its heft in thy pocket. Would ye give up that lucky piece for a task such as this? Aye, aye, and a million times aye! Would that Ahab could but trade in all the gold in his deep dug coffers to meet Moby Dick this very hour! For just as Moby Dick cares not for gold, such is the hardened heart of Ahab now.

But the men before the mast!, that sorry lot will feel its lustery pull and thereby pull for the owning of it, and pull to start their eyes out. Count on that, Ahab, for if ever there be a truth in this strange and wicked world, it is that men will do their utmost for what is but ground-dug rock! And this one, stamped with astrological signs, imbued by that Quito witch with luck that needs must be sung from it. But what’s the tune? It eely melody is but half-rememberd; Alma did teach it to thee after long bouts of lovemaking and Ahab did learn it then, and much else besides, but the years have plastered it over, and slathered many coats of whitewash over that. No matter; it will come to thee anon. Ye must remember the tune ere offering it up, else the luck will die or, worse yet, turn to bite the singer.

Aye, that’s it; sing the luck from out the coin and nail that gold piece to the mast like a beacon to shine from every sailor’s eye. Do this and ye may yet avoid, for a short time only, that infandous deed that needs must be done ere thy purpose is fulfilled and redemption won.

Such is thy craven misgiving, Ahab that thou canst write of that pending necessary killing but only obliquely? What sallow-bellied thing hast thou become? Have ye not taken leviathan blood lo these forty years past, and yet now thou quailest at taking the blood of man, evil though he be? Did not Fedallah declare the deed crucial to Ahab’s continuance, and his own?

Avast, coward! Breathe some iron into thy heart. Nay, breathe steel; breathe diamond; breathe like the great gusting bellows pumped to stoke the forge-fire of Hephaestus himself to white-hot creation.

Ah, how much damnation can thy soul bear, Ahab and not founder on the shoals of madness proper? For ye are but now beneath lunacy’s lintel and have been beckoned within. Enter not!, lest ye cast off from thy purpose, thy redemption. So down thy potion, and hold fast Ahab, and trust in gold’s glim to light the eyes of others who may the sooner sing out for Moby Dick, so ye may the sooner see him spout his black blood, and make of him a corpse!

Chapter

The Little Lower Layer

Not a great while after the affair of the pipe, one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden.

Soon his steadily lurching ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread that they were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought. As he paced, he hummed some eldritch melody, accompanied by the clocklike metronome of his whalebone leg.

On the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced and hum in him as he hummed; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.

“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks the shell. ‘Twill soon be out.”

The hours wore on. It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, as in sudden remembrance, his features turned all of an instant from pensive to purposeful, and, inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there by the bulwarks, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.

“Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.

“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come down!”

When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck, the selfsame singsong hum under his breath. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, Ahab cried:—

“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”

“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.

“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.

“And what do ye next, men?”

“Lower away, and after him!”

“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”

“A dead whale or a stove boat!”

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

“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? I had it off a comely shamaness, and since Ahab was a man of twenty-two, ever has it brought me good fortune. Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”

While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to the coin, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.

Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”

“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.

“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul: “a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.”

All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific recollection.

“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.”

“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”

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

“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”

“And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him—him—“ faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle—“like him—him—“

“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby carking Dick!”

“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise. “Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but was it not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?”

“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand in now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day, and more than I can tell ye besides!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”

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

“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?”

“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”

“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!”

“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow.”

“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”

“Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; oh, knowest thou not the full extent of Moby Dick’s undoubted deed, its unliving yet contagious action; in me it writhes!

“I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare!

“So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat hast melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilean! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tossed sapling cannot, Starbuck! From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. [Aside] Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.”

“God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.

But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.

“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab as the steward, Dough-Boy, handed the vessel to Ahab.

Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.

“Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest seaman. “Round with it, round! Short draughts—long swallows, men; ‘tis hot as Satan’s hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!” He thrust the empty flagon at Dough-Boy.

“Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me.

“Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright.

“In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ‘tis well. For did ye three but once take the full-forced shock of my gaze, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!”

Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers cut the lashings that held the iron cup of the harpoon snug to the wooden haft of that instrument, in much the same manner as Ahab’s fleshy scarred stump went into the socket of his whalebone leg. The harpooneers now stood with the detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held barbs up, before him.

“Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!” Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.

“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.

Chapter

Soliloquies

[Scene: The captain’s cabin by the stern windows;
Ahab sitting alone and gazing out. After some
time, Waving his hand he moves from the window.]

‘Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but Ahab’s demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one.

That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel Me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

[Starbuck, at dusk.]

My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should bear arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his deliquescent end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.

Horrible old man! He hast gorgonized the crew, and Starbuck besides! Who’s over him, Ahab cries;—aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below!

Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key rewind the pendulum and lift the weight high again.

[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.]

Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the undead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings, haunted by the groaning hull.

The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ‘tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild, untutored things are forced to feed—Oh, life! ‘tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but ‘tis not me! that horror’s out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blesséd influences!

[Stubb alone, mending a brace.]

Ha! ha-ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it ever since, and that ha-ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt when back in my kennel of a hammock. Be sure the old Mogul has fixed Starbuck, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift, might readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb—that’s my title, for didn’t the merman give it to me in dreams?—well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles!

I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra!

What’s my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying her eyes out?—Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate’s pennant, and so am I—fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh—

We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,
To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.

A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—[aside] he’s my superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken; for who but unseen God does not?—Aye, aye, sir, just through with this job—coming.

Chapter

Moby Dick

Ishmael was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge, though we had but a teenth of the truth regarding the White Whale.

The White Whale! I need come clean regarding the colorless all-color hue of white, which engenders in me no small trepidation. In some things, the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fails to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appalls the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.

But stay your judgment gainst this seemingly irrational fear, for there is yet more to the whiteness that terrifies me in particular, and at the root of this fear, like a pale mushroom wrapped round the root of a tree in loamy darkness, the root of this fear is yet deeper and more noisome. Though it pains me sore to speak of it, that pale pallor of corpse-whiteness I bespoke earlier is yet more horrible when seen on a loved one who—Ah! I can barely move this quill!—who died, but pales to death’s pallor, then Quickens to come with unblinking, noiseless snarls to rend her former loving father. See that and fear ye not the colorless color, then ye are no longer human but mayhap a ghoul yourself.

Indulge me on yet more regarding whiteness, but less ghoulish, I assure you. First, a series of queries: Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it that, as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?

And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly kisses on the cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like Lilith’s mother the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the White Whale was the symbol and, as ye shall yet see, much more than symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. And yet, there were even more rarified tidings about the whale, and the number of souls in the world who knew its true nature could be counted on one hand by a thumbless man.

It was hardly to be doubted that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude, malignity—and even, some said, immortality—which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, and one devouring amputation—but fatal to the last degree of fatality in most encounters. Only one known soul—Ahab—did escape from that final doom, but not to survive; instead inheriting a doom by degrees.

Those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come. Did they but know the truth of Moby Dick, their fortitude would have been not shaken, but shattered, and thereby undone altogether!

Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears; and yet still these fantastical suppositions did not capture the horrible truth of him. Nevertheless, in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw. Had they the full knowing, none would have been inclined to engage the vast beast; none save a raging lunatic; none save Ahab.

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time. Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.

It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Northwest Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage), and forget not the interconnected wonders of the pool of McElligot’s; these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen. In all revealed superstition lies some concealed grain of truth.

And yet, even were it stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump, the pale hue of walking corpses. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of yeasty foam, all spangled with mitochondrial gleamings.

Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.

Already many fatalities had attended the chase of Moby Dick. But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering death he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn and dying comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into serene, exasperating sunlight that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay could have smote him with more seeming malice. Be it here revealed that Ahab is the sole survivor of so intimate an encounter with the creature.

Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that more-than-fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual, existential and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating at them, as the heartworm’s ventrical squirmings, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.

That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;[1]—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

[1]Ophites: A sect from around 100 AD, they believed the serpent who tempted Eve with the apple of knowledge was the story’s hero, and God the villain.

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, nothing more. Certain it is he did not feel those fungal tendrils that then wended their way upward from the wound to his very brain, there to threaten blooming.

Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards some nearby port, they made a straight wake for California and medicine; then it was that Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock; his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage to Santa Cruz, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales.

And finally, Santa Cruz and all California behind them, and the Pequod running into more sufferable seas, the ship, with mild stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil Pacific, and, with the mysterious Parsee’s mystic ministrations—for he had boarded the ship in Santa Cruz—Ahab’s delirium finally seemed left behind him, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders to lower for whales once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; but, as in his constrained monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the unliving instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, aye! his very lifeblood, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.

This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman baths; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.

Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him. The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause.

Upon finally arriving back in Nantucket some two years later—for Ahab had continued whaling in the hope of finding Moby Dick even then—I say two years and more later, When Ahab finally set his one good foot back on Nantucket, he learned of the zomby plague unleashed upon the land, and only then did overwhelming guilt become melded with his vengeful rage and so did the full strength of his madness take him over entire. All this and more was revealed by the log entries Ahab then penned.

All the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, did sit brooding on Ahab’s brow; who among ye would not sit brooding the same had ye lost your very life and yet remained alive? Far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable febrile notion; such a one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack.

But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man!; had any known his pivotal role in unleashing the zomby plague upon the land, they would have clapped him in irons or strung him high from a yardarm, the closest thing to a tree in all Nantucket, or burned him to ashes! But no, Ahab retained his secret heart, and whilst they, the shipowners, were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint, he was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge-cum-redemption.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly, godlike old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs though they knew not its true source; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,—all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael could then go.

The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a 74-gun warship can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill. Had I but known how the ill that Moby Dick truly was would surpass the ill imagined, I might have taken that final plunge from the t’gallant cross-trees. Aye, and gladly.

Chapter

Hark!

“Hist, Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?!”

It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.

It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor the words above.

“Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”

Cabaco looked to his own neighbor, his bosom friend, Bulkington; took the bucket from him and held it out to Archy, who was now crouched with his ear pointed downward to the deck, listening.

“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”

“There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a cough—it sounded like queer cough; maybe a groan.”

“Groan be damned! Fill that bucket and return it.”

“There again—there it is!—a thump and a moan; it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over, now!”

“Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits ye et for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the bucket!”

“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”

“Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the chap.”

“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody or some thing down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind.”

“Tish! the bucket!”

Chapter

Whale Charts

Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him descend to his cabin and, after glancing askance toward the afterhold, go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. When poring over these charts, not five minutes would pass before Ahab would grab for a quill, jab it into the inkpot and scratch away with feverish intensity at his sharkskin-bound logbook.

While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.

But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted; and on no night did Ahab fail to make some entry in his log. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul; ever and anon would he stop and wet his nib in fresh ink to scribble in the log at his elbow; some nights found him foregoing the consultation of charts in order to write long and frantically, stopping only to wring the cramps from his hand.

Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.

Where Ahab’s chances of accomplishing his object—and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty; that particular set time and place were conjoined in the one technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line.[1] For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile. There it was, too, that the recentest deadly encounters with the White Whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds. But that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance was further north, off the Japan grounds, and the Pequod would cruise there first before descending to cruise the Season on the Line.

[1]The Line is the equator, the season thereupon lasting from December to June.

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved redemptive desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. Not quite so was it for Ahab, for though his nails did indeed gouge his palm, yet no blood was there to be found, and those four small crescentic wounds in each palm did not heal.

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.

Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the White Whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of livid light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, for a creature has been created in thee; and thy thoughts have created yet another; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

Ahab's Log: Chapter

Dismasted

Ahab’s log: February 23, 1851

Sleep is but a stage on which the past plays out, strutting and fretting its nightly hour on thy brainy stage, and again, and again, and again dost thou feel thy dismasting off locked Japan when, unknowing of what ye risked, didst thou jump, knife in hand, to do battle, nay! hand-to-tooth combat with the curséd White Whale. And ye lost that fight and lost thy very life though ye knew it not then; and aye, lost all future dreamless sleep besides!

And when by chance ye can catch at the skirts of sleep enough to dream, thy dismasting rears afresh. There again, and again, and again do ye go down midst the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that ye scarce heed the moment when ye drop, seething into the yawning, yeasty jaws awaiting thee; and again Moby Dick shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white knives upon thy leg. Sinful as thou art, thou darest not weep and wail for direct deliverance. Yet ye know thy dreadful punishment is unjust, do ye not? Aye, there’s the screw that turns in ye; there’s the dark seed that blooms in thy raging, fevered brain!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. Yon lovely light on deck above, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—what folly such courtesy now meanest to thee, for never again will ye have such a thing. Some nights are filled with dreaming, and all dreaming filled with that dismasting and worse, oh, aye, worse beyond endurance! Just now, started from sweating sleep, did ye struggle to refrain from clambering up in fearful palsied stupor to the deck, there to be gawked at, aghast, by the crew.

Not two minutes past, behind sleep-lidded eyes didst thou see the infected crimson life that redly jetted from that ragged stump in rhythm with thy pumping heart; again ye see Caspar take his own belt from round his trowsers and he stoops to cinch down that tourniquet to its utmost, thus stemming the bloody freshet, then did he bathe Ahab’s sweating delirious brow with his cool cloth, his tender touch.

It was that blasted blood that did infect Caspar—thy own tainted, blasted blood, acrawl with some nameless yeasty thing as thou didst later learn. And then—oh, folly!—fool that I then was and yet may be, I, Ahab, did unknowingly release Caspar in Santa Cruz; for the gore he had witnessed—not only that which had so redly jetted from Ahab’s stump, but such gore as is present in all the normal butchery of any whaling voyage,—it unmanned and sickened Caspar; all this and more he didst relate to Ahab in heartfelt apology before taking his leave of the Pequod.

Cruel irony! That such a gentle soul should become that which would have made the then-living man quake in revulsion! Pray then, Ahab, most fervently! that no spirit is left in the zomby; that none of the past is left in its black heart; for only then will ye sleep; only then will ye have any hope to retain what wits are left ye. Were it such that one’s memory lived on within a rotten, slavering corpse, detached somehow from the slaughter witnessed through the soul’s windows, the eyes, then wouldst Caspar be in a torment beyond all imaginings. Oh, thou Abomination! Let it not be so!

Again and again dost Ahab relive that bone-crunching pressure and the froth of phrensied water, the unspeakable wriggling about the gums of Moby Dick’s crooked jaw, and the sound!: that sharp Crack ! that was more heard than felt, for it was ponderous loud. No pain, no pain, and that’s queer. The pain pounded down the alley of thy brain later when Caspar wrenched his belted tourniquet tighter and the carpenter produced his bone saw and set to work.

And yet, that dismasting dream is as a dream of summer dalliance in comparison to those others; aye, a dream to coax nocturnal emissions compared to those no less frequent nightmares in which demons cavort, dancing mad jigs and goading Ahab on to gorge himself on yet-living flesh that weeps with blood; and in these dreams he does, Ahab does, I do with wild abandon give in to that dire hunger and fall to at the trough of some poor soul’s trunk: its gray looping entrails, the bright crimson slick and delicious on Ahab’s chin. And the horror, the starting horror that sends thee reeling to screaming wakefulness, clawing thy way to the deck and damn the staring eyes; no, it is not the horror of the deed—though that be terrible enough—but it is horror at the unmitigated pleasure Ahab dost feel in sinking his teeth deep into those succulent sweetmeats; the savage thrill of drinking hot blood! Even now, Ahab, in full possession of thy faculties, dost that pleasure haunt thee, and make thee jump at any thumping noise from yon afterhold. For there resides thy greatest fear: fear that ‘tis thy doom and thy destiny to feed thus that knocks there! Can it be so?

Ahab says nay! Thy destiny lies along a different path, old man—hast not Fedallah prophesied it?—so be still, Old Thunder, aye, calm thy thunderings; for there in the afterhold reside the tools thou needest to fulfill thy destiny, and thereby earn thy redemption—nothing more!

Chapter

In the Shadow of the Moon

Though consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate killing of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long habituation, far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated undead one he hunted.

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stands in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his captain’s leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon him.

The subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick; I, Ishmael did, of a certainty.

Signs and portents had begun to accumulate in the deeper recesses of my awareness concerning Ahab; things noted but unregarded by my waking mind: his pinprick pupils, tinier than warranted even by the blazing sun, and still miotic on cloudy days and in the dark when I chanced to see him; the fidgety scratching he engaged in when he thought none observed, but was easily seen from aloft; the constant smacking of his lips as though suffering from severe draughmouth; all these signs I knew well from my own past laudanum dependence, and though they were seen by me, yet they were ignored as ludicrous, at least until such a time as more evidence accumulated and such signs could no longer be ignored. And yet, even at that point, it was an easy assumption that the laudanum eased the pain of his livid stump, rubbed raw from Ahab’s constant pacings.

But for the moment, however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of Ahab’s quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable—we live in the varying outer weather, and inhale its fickleness—and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and hold us healthily suspended before the final dash.

Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion mankind disdains all base considerations, down to life itself; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust.

I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash—aye, cash. The doubloon may hold them enthralled now, but it is not the cash they signed for; let some months go by, and no perspective promise of cash to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab. Aye, and no gold doubloon nailed to the mast would alter that fact one whit, for that coin, lucky or no, goes to one man only.

Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod’s voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself.

That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected to. For all these reasons then, and others perhaps, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit of his profession.

Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.

Chapter

The Weavers

Sultry and full of clouds was the afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn, and now and then sharing of his wild pipe: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.

There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be Chance—aye, Chance, Free Will, and Necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working together.

The straight warp of Necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; Free Will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and Chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of Necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by Free Will, though thus prescribed to by both, Chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events. And with such thoughts did my mind did chance to stumble back in time; the shuttle of my mind wended backwards to distant days, like Penelope unweaving the shroud of Laertes, thereby unravelling the passing of time to stave off distasteful fate. I had watched Lilith’s lithe fingers weave thus; indeed many are the times I did happily sit and quietly watch the smooth and supple dexterity of those small, strong, hands.

Lilith was a weaver of grass baskets, and had Ariadne put her gods-given skill to such a task she could not have crafted baskets more clever than those that came from the deft and lightly freckled hands of Lilith. In an effort to turn her hands to a trade other than that of her slatternly mother, Lilith had taken it upon herself to learn many queer and diverse abilities, and would coquettishly pester any who would teach her their secrets. But the majority of those trades she dabbled in never did please her overmuch and so were laid aside, as was aught that did not keep her enthralled, or leastwise interested, a fact I learned well while courting her. One such trade Lilith well enjoyed and so pursued to its utmost was the weaving of baskets, made from rushes and grass such as are found on many shores. “It soothes me,” she once smilingly said. To speak of Lil at all, one must needs speak of Awashonks.

From the age of eight, Lilith was raised by Awashonks, a kindly crone of the Sakonnet Indians, northern neighbors of Tashtego’s Gay Head Wampanoags, and dear friend of Lil’s father, absent upon the sea. Bent and brown as a berry from the weathering of years and no small share of woe, Awashonks was both strong and kind and, in spite of the tragedy that had befallen her people, she was always smiling. And for all this good nature, Lilith said there was an iron core to Awashonks, for her blood ran pure; it was royal blood, as was her name, a storied name and much revered among her people. Awashonks of old was a female saschem, or chief, of the Sakonnet tribe; was a warrior against the British; was a signer of treaties; and Lilith’s foster-mother wore the name of Awashonks proudly.

From Awashonks Lilith learned many things, not least of which was to weave intricate, water-tight wee baskets, and large loose ones, and any kind in between, all neat and trim as ever a basket could be, with cross-hatched designs dyed by her own hand and sometimes with her very blood, and these baskets she would sell to any who would buy. Her favorite customers had always been sailors, newly landed, and with vivid stories from all over the watery part of the world pouring from them, honey to her mind; and it did not hurt that those new-landed yarn-spinners had cash awash in their well-worn pockets, hard-earned from their labours on the deep.

I myself had just landed in Portsmouth after eighteen months before the mast on a merchant ship, walking the strand, glad for the coin in my purse, and gladder still for the hard-packed sand under my feet, though the ground did seem to sway a bit as it will to one whose eely legs have long since learned the trick of staying upright amid the pitch and yaw of a ship at sea.

I had sat myself in the lee of a dune, content and curious as to what fate or circumstance might next bring me, content to feel the breeze and watch the clouds roll by, content to be without whim or whimsy, content as a schoolboy in midsummer, when, over the edge of the dune came a young woman so beautiful I truly thought her a figment. I suspected she was one of the Fey, or, given our closeness to the sea, mayhap an oceanid; for her sea-willow beauty seemed magic. She carried a fat sheave of tough sawgrass bundled cleverly with a twine of her own devising, made from that very same grass, looped over her slim shoulder and her eyes were green sea foam, sparkling in morning sun. In a century of dreaming I would never have imagined what first came from those pale mirthful lips.

She smiled, said hello and sat a discreet distance away and I, stumble-mouthed and somewhat alarmed, was not able to say a word when, with a knowing twinkle in her eye, and without preamble, she said, “T’other week, I heard from my mum a man in a public house, a bit later in the evening, if you take my meaning,” she said, making a drinking motion with her hand, “this man did make a bet, gainst all the men in that fine establishment, for d’ye see, he’d run out of money and yet still had possession of a fierce and fiery thirst he needs must quench.

“Well this here Thirsty-man, he did bet those other men to each stand him a drink, due any time that evening, if he did but take one long swallow from the overflowing brass spittoon at their booted feet. One of t’other men addended that bet to say that none would pay if aught came up again.” Her pale-lipped mouth opened wide, teeth flashing in the sun, and her pink tongue jutted wetly in a surprisingly unladylike vomiting motion. She’d had a faraway look in her eye while telling the story thus far, as though she saw clearly in her mind’s eye that bar and those men; but pausing, her face now uncontorted, her eyes snapping back into green focus upon me and she said, “Are ye with me?”

“In...Indeed,” I stammered out, already thinking, always.

“So, taking a deep breath, and the rest of the bar breathless and stomachs all asquirm, Thirsty-man does stoop, sloshing some of the thick dark sputum over the rim of the brass spittoon,” she said glancing briefly at me. I could not take my eyes from her and felt a smile coming not only to my face, but throughout my being as she continued.

“The thick liquid smells a bit sour, like the smell of rotting apples in fall, but with some smoky, saltiness hard to describe, but the flies did seem to enjoy it. He waved them away, our Thirsty-man, and looked to the crowd surrounding him. ‘Do ye swear to honor your words, men? Are there no welchers among ye?’ The crowd did answer in both the affirmative and the negative, and it not clear which answer went with which question, but the man, satisfied enough, then lifted that overflowing brass spittoon to his lip and made ready for a large gulp—indeed the crowd loudly admonished him to do so—all now getting behind the lark. They chanted, ‘Drink, drink, drink,’ rhythmically, and no few faces had widened eyes and did seem a bit pale about the gills, as though they themselves might sick up right there on the bar.

“Our thirsty protagonist then opened his mouth and filled his cheeks with the slimy liquid,” now this strange and fascinating woman did look to my face to see my reaction. I sensed a climax coming, for at last my wits began to clear somewhat and I realized I was hearing a joke story. That smile within me widened.

“Thirsty-man’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows and the crowd roars its approval and some move to clap the man on the back, but he continues to swallow and now there are shouts of consternation! ‘Stop! Stop, for God’s sake, man, stop!’ but he continues to gulp down that foul brew. Men already pale became paler and more than one offered to buy the man drinks all night if he would but stop! Some others did quietly turn to vomit upon themselves. But he did not stop. He finished it ALL.”

She paused to let the image resonate; the climax was at hand, her comedic timing impeccable. She continued, “The man wiped his lips and also his face, for it was somewhat smeared, as the men around him, clamoring to buy him whisky, asked him, ‘Gods, man. Why in hell’s name didn’t ye stop?’

‘Couldn’t,’ the man said, pantingly, ‘it was all of a piece.’”

I laughed in startled amusement and applauded and sung her praises, then asked her name, offering up my own in trade. She blushed a bit, and the colour added no small depth to her countenance, nor lodged her less firmly in my heart.

I would later learn that this jesting approach was but one example of Lilith’s calculated artistry of technique, drawing upon prodigious clarity of judgment on her part regarding another’s tolerance for the indecorous or the bawdy. When desiring to engage with a stranger who caught her fancy, or from whom she might have some need, Lil would quickly assess the stranger and, drawing from no small store of bawdy songs and the sorts of jokes such as sailors tell, and other lore, like legends shared with her by Awashonks, Lilith would size up the stranger and soon decide what yarn in her repertoire might titillate the stranger just enough to be pleasantly shocked, but not so much as to think her rude or embarrassing, whatever that may mean to the one so approached; therein lay the hard-won artistry of the woman. None could have stood long against such wiles; I was infatuated and soon, not a little in love.

Lilith would later say of my instant infatuation that I was simply too long aboard ship and would have entered rut at any female form, likening me to a baby bird that, upon hatching, follows the first thing it sees as its mother; this is but teasing humility on her part, and since I have expounded already upon the pulchritude of her form and spirit I will desist; nor will I subject you to my reams of poetry regarding her, all of it wonderfully deplorable.

I did follow her like a baby bird however, and bought all the baskets she could weave, and wooed her with all my might, for never had I met a creature, whether man or beast, towards whom I ever felt such need to be near, towards whom I have yearned to clasp close, as part of my very lifeblood.

Taking Lilith as my best beloved was not so easy as the writing of it, nor was I alone in the pursuit of her. I proposed marriage many times, but always she demurred, for she had been sore used by her first love and feared a repetition. I knew her nature ere long, and to keep her interest, would regale her with stories and song and such jokes as seemed appropriate, though when I learned of her foul mouth and heard such a filthy joke from her as ever I heard from a hardened salt aboard ship, I never held another such joke from her afterwards. Before another eighteen months had passed, we were wed and our first child, sweet Genevieve had quickened inside my Lilith. But hard down on that Ishmael! Choose another word, for Heaven’s sake!; at just that time must dismasted Ahab have arrived at Santa Cruz to sow his evil spore there! though I knew naught of that till he had gone down to meet his doom, yet just the same were chance and circumstance weaving our strands together on the shared loom of this wildly woven world.

Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-goddess, she weaves; and by that weaving is she deafened, that she hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings
may be overheard afar.

I started, and came back to my present circumstance at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will I had been mindlessly weaving with dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. From few lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Wampanoag.

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.

“There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”

“Where-away?”

“On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”

Instantly all was commotion.

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus.

“There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.

“Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”

Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to Ahab.

The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. One of the men selected for shipkeepers—that is, those not appointed to the boats—by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three sawgrass baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale.

But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.

Chapter

First Lowering

The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain’s, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the unliving hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;—a people notorious for a certain diabolism of subtlety, and by some honest mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord.

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

“Ready,” was the half-hissed reply.

“Lower away then; d’ye hear?” shouting across the deck. “Lower away there, I say!”

Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men sprang over the rail; the ivory sheaves whirled round in the ivory blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship’s side into the tossed boats below.

Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.

“Captain Ahab?” said Starbuck.

“Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab; “give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great steering oar. “Lay back!” addressing his crew. “There!—there!—there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!—lay back!”

“Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.”

“Oh, I don’t mind’em, sir,” said Archy; “I knew it all before now. Didn’t I hear ‘em in the hold? Didn’t I tell you and Bulkington there of it, Cabaco? What say ye, Cabaco? They’re stowaways, Mr. Flask. It sounded like there were more than these!” Bulkington frowned and pulled savagely at his oar.

“Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones,” drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness. “Why don’t you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands come to help us—never mind from where—the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone—devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that’s the stroke for a thousand pounds; that’s the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men—all hearts alive! Easy, easy; don’t be in a hurry—don’t be in a hurry. Why don’t you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so, then:—softly, softly! That’s it—that’s it! long and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can’t ye? pull, won’t ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don’t ye pull?—pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out! Here!” whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; “every mother’s son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That’s it—that’s it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her—start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!”

Stubb’s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped—open-mouthed at times—that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.

In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.

“Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye please!”

“Halloa!” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set like a flint from Stubb’s.

“What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!

“Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong, boys!)” in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: “A sad business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit, hand in hand.”

“Aye, aye, I thought as much,” soliloquized Stubb, when the boats diverged, “as soon as I clapt eye on ‘em, I thought so. Aye, and that’s what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long suspected, but methinks there is more to this mystery. They were hidden down there; what else might be stowed in secret? The White Whale’s at the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right! Give way, men! It ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!”

Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s company; but Archy’s fancied discovery having some time previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so, what with all this and Stubb’s confident way of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s precise agency in the matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious lurching shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during dim Nantucket’s foggy dawn. Also, I then remembered the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah and still, thought I, there is yet more to this affair than meets the eye.

Meantime, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to windward, Ahab was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed, while the boat’s five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.

“Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou, Queequeg, stand up!”

Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.

Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still; its commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a man’s hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.

“I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to that.”

Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders for a pedestal.

“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”

“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet taller.”

Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the gigantic African, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.

At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of majesty, the noble man to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad black back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to Daggoo’s lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.

Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, was resolved to solace the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, “Down, down all, and give way!—there they are!”

To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring would have been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.

All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills.

“Pull, pull, my good boys,” said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.

How different the loud little King-Post. “Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I’ll sign over to you my Martha’s Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. Lay me on—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad! See! see that white water!” And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat’s stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.

“Look at that chap now,” philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed after—“He’s got fits, that Flask has. Fits? yes, give him fits—that’s the very word—pitch fits into ‘em. Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;—merry’s the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all. But what the devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your knives in two—that’s all. Take it easy—why don’t ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and lungs!”

But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blesséd light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and unblinking eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.

Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask to “that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat’s bow with its tail—these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments.

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.

Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle with the lumbering undead; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;—neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.

The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung upon the sea; a storm was nigh upon us. The jets of vapour no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck at the steering oar of my own boat giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the row-locks.

Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship nor boat to be seen.

“Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes. There’s white water again!—close to! Spring!”

Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!” and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.

Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.

“That’s his hump. There, THERE, give it to him!” whispered Starbuck.

A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.

Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the frigid stormy sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean.

The wind increased to a howl; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars now performed the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair. That hopeless hope however vain, is yet a humanizing one, unpossessed by even the freshest zomby in all its vast host.

Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not much more than its length.

Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,—an oar or a lance pole. Despite the storm, the tribulation, and the terror, such dire straits were nevertheless more preferable—aye, and safer—to me than the past two years ashore.

Chapter

The Hyena

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when you must take this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof you but dimly discern, and you more than suspect that the joke is at nobody’s expense but your own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worthwhile disputing. You bolt down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to you only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.

That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of comes over you only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of your earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to you a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke, though there be a touch of madness to it. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of desperado philosophy; such a state is more difficult to achieve in the Militia, I can assure you.

I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object as some grand joke; and not only from the dunking I had received but moreso from that strange crew of Ahab’s; it seemed the pinnacle of dark ironic humor and so, hanging there on the Pequod’s side, I laughed and laughed, and you will understand if there was some small touch of lunacy to the sound.

“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.

“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”

“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.”

“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s jaws?”

“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I should like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!”

Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacs on the deep were matters of common occurrence; considering that at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings—considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in what an undead devil’s chase I was unknowingly implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, “come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should tinker at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing; never did I do such a thing while crushing zomby skulls; I cared nothing for my life then. However, upon the present occasion, after the ceremony was concluded, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. All the days I should now live would be as good as the days that biblically august zomby Lazarus lived after his resurrection, for I survived myself; my death, beheading and cremation—if it ever did come to that—were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.

Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the zomby fetch the hindmost.

Chapter

Subordinate Phantoms

Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”

“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know.”

“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”

Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether the invaluable life of the self-styled Sword of Islam ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.

But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.

Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men as that same boat’s crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless, at Fedallah’s bidding, Ahab had taken private measures of his own touching all that matter.

Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that immortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat and most assuredly not this boat crew. There was something queer about them; the way they moved raised my hackles and made me twitch.

For now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him.

But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours from which came the demoniac oft-slaughtered broods whelped by that discarded first consort of Adam himself.

Chapter

The
Spirit Spout

Days melted into weeks, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlit night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Persian perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t’gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.

This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas. Though we knew it not at the time, those who would have thus lost their lives would have been counted most fortunate.

These temporary apprehensions, so thankfully vague, but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.

But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.

Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, as called of yore by Dias the Portagee; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.

So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together if he did but blink; he stood as one frozen with rictus face and hectic gaze. Meantime, the crew, driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock.

Never could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw Ahab, sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair, but with head lolled back to its utmost in sleeping repose; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had just emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat.

On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents which have previously been spoken of, and next to that an empty vial rolled crazily hither and yon with the pitching of the ship. Though his body was erect, the head was thrown back, his staring open eyes were pointed fixed upon the needle of the tell-tale that swung there from a beam in the ceiling.[1] And yet did Ahab breathe in what seemed the deepest sleep.

[1]The cabin-compass, called the tell-tale, is thus mounted below the binnacle compass so the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the course of the ship.

Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder. In all this tumult thou sleepest thy hideous sleep; seeing not the black sky nor the raging sea; feeling not the reeling timbers and not hearing or at least not heeding the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is like to cleave the seas before him, leading him on to his doom, I fear, and the doom of us all. And yet here he lolls, with open eyes—Sweet Mother of Mercy!, who but a madman dost sleep with open eyes!—and in a gale besides.

I know not whether to be in awe or revulsion, old man; as a mindless zomby, thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.

Ahab’s Log: Chapter

Slouching from
Santa Cruz

Ahab’s log, September 19, 1851

Ah, thou Pacific, we turn eastward to thee at last! Yon prolific sea rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, muscled Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; the tide-beating heart of earth.

We make good speed toward thy storied waters, thou vast ocean, ye who even now embrace the putrid bulk of Moby Dick; I feel him luring us thither, as though some fist clutched my very stones, and by them he pullest me inexorably onward; this groping clutch didst thou feel one instant prior to Fedallah’s ethereal ululation from the masthead that first night Moby Dick’s foul spout was sighted, and deep in my midmost keel an ache awoke. Is this that mystic link that Fedallah didst endeavor to explain?

Though I pile stuns’l upon stuns’l, yet still does he elude me! Were it only Ahab at the solitary helm, and Ahab in the rigging, and all Ahab slumbering there in the forecastle, then onward would we all push, but Ahab is not yet so mad as that. Though it galls thee, the Pequod must tarry for the taking of whales, if only to forestall mutinous thought; yon Pacific needs must await; thou must bide thy time, old man.

That vast undulating typhoon-tossed body of water brings memory of death, dismemberment and worse to me! For yea though it doth surround the corpus of him I hate, yet does it also lap those shores where Ahab’s greatest folly was loosed upon the world. Oh, Santa Cruz, so recently and ironically wrested from Mexico’s breast with the advent of the undead host; would that California’s bandit ways did crush fair Caspar before he escaped thy outpost clutches. Oh, Death! why canst thou not sometimes be timely?

When Ahab’s stump was yet bloody, raw and aching from the bone saw that did hack off the ragged end of thy masticated tibia, Fedallah appeared alongside the Pequod in some ancient scow, seeming to ooze from out the very substance of the world as the fog does ooze from the air in that region. He slithered aboard, made the crew to know he could grant Ahab succour would they but allow him to tend to that bloody stump; and as they were at wit’s end—for neither herbs nor other remedies they could obtain were in any way effectual against thy raging fever, worsening by the hour—they gladly assented.

Fedallah didst appear aboard the Pequod at the behest of some ancient Persian prophecy, one to which he had devoted dozens of decades of study, for the prophecy identified Fedallah as agent and emissary to thou, Ahab, its chief mover. He spoke but little on this head, saying only that the signs were not entirely clear, but would become more so as the moment of thy apotheosis and his own drew nigh. Thy memory is vague and little stands out from that time but the feel of Fedallah’s cold touch on Ahab’s sweat-glossed forehead, and the taste of that bitter brew that hast become no less vile with time, but welcome just the same. And often dost the sweet face of Caspar swim up through thy hallucinations during that horrid time.

Caspar, thy indispensable cabin boy, though he was no more boy than thou wert a woman; full seventeen years he had. Not overbright, but easily stomached for all his cheery good will; as a bright sun to thy dark thunderings was he. Had I but known the hell he would wreak upon the earth, despite my love for the lad, I would have given him a blow to stave his skull, thereby killing him but thereby also saving Ahab from the greater burden of damnation wrought by him; and with that killing would thou have also saved so many millions more from the blasted horror that now walkest about the wretched land. But hard down on that, old man, for that path was closed to thy vision; ye could not know what lay in store down that twisted path. Ah, sweet ignorance! Would that Fedallah had found Ahab prior to Caspar’s leave-taking, thereby sparing thee thy guilt and the foul duty ye are even now fulfilling; and thereby sparing also the world its wicked woe!

Fedallah’s mysterious sources whispered that Caspar had spread the plague from Frisco up to the Oregon territory and thence back along that snaky Oregon trail as he whored his way eastward, moving with ever-sickening, ever-contagious pace to his family in Fort Caspar, a family he would never reach, for the lad was ignominiously despatched in a pass in the Owl Creek Mountains in the spring of 1848; done in by none other than Elija Black himself, ere he became the whispered legend told of today by that superstitious lot in the forecastle. A black day it was indeed when Ahab allowed the lad off the ship to send him homeward-bound with a blessing that was in sooth the foulest curse.

Aye, thy fate hast launched thee at length upon those almost final Pacific waters, and as thy Pequod glides ever more nigh the Japanese cruising-ground whence Moby Dick devoured thy leg and took from thee thy humanity, thy purpose intensifies. Thy firm lips meet like the lips of a vice; the Delta of thy forehead’s veins swell like overladen brooks; in the depths of sleep, Starbuck tells thee that thy ringing cry runs through all the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts black blood!” Thankful should ye be, old man, that those other dreams cannot be heard; aye, those dreams Fedallah says bring whimpers to thy sleep-slackened lips; whimpers and pleading.

Awake, thou art thine own; awake, thou art Ahab; awake, dost thou feel that clear spirit in thee; awake, dost thou feel thy purpose surge from sole of foot to lofty brow, coursing like clearest fire through the scar that connectest thy earthbound feet to the unbounded heaven that towers even now above thy crown.

In the success of this voyage lies salvation, not for thee alone, but wrought also upon all ashore still plagued by the walking dead. If thy quest fails in its aim, the Pearly Gates will clang shut in thy teeth and Peter shall scoff and spit at thee and send thee hence to those other, hotter gates below, those that burnest with black flame in thy dreams.

Aye, curséd dreams from a curséd dreamer, dreaming thy nightmare way across these waters; feel thy good ship turn her prow eastward as we at last make way toward the vast Pacific, and the death of Moby Dick!

Chapter

The Albatross

Southeastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts—a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen—a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.

The craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.

“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”

But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his speaking-trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his own speaking-trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to—”

At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.

“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice that seemed to me a little diminished,—“Up helm! Keep her off round the world!”

Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those dear loves that I left behind in the earth’s embrace—and by these very hands!—they were all the time before me.

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, or the secret land of the Fey, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.

Chapter

The Gam

Of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers have most reason to be sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies on Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious shamefaced hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is—“How many skulls?”—the same way that whalers hail—“How many barrels?” And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don’t like to see overmuch of each other’s villainous likenesses.

But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a “gam,” a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,” and suchlike pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and even the vile slave-ship sailors cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer.

But what is a gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. Let me learnedly define it:

gam. noun—A social meeting of two (or more) whaleships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews; the two captains remaining, for the time on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.

There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery. In a pirate or man-of-war, when the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all, using instead the long steering oar reserved for that position. High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat’s crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a lone pine tree.

Being conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his eely legs. Nor is this any easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the aftermost-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up.

It would never do, in plain sight of the world’s riveted eyes, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers’ pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say—to seize hold of the nearest oarsman’s hair, and hold on there like grim death.

Chapter

Aloft & Alone

Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts in the Southern Indian Ocean, the Pequod fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow animalcules upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.

On the second day, I mounted to the cross-trees for my two-hours watch just as a goodly number of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip.

As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the wheat-colored sea.

But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock set in fields of undulating wheat than anything else.

How is it that those myriad, ephemeral ghosts we deem memories, suffused with such concepts as past and time and Heaven—how marvelous and how terrible that such ghosts as these haunting the houses of our skulls can be so evoked in the very thingness of the world? How is it that that barnacled whale I saw below me could so evoke another ground-bound boulder at my back, the brit so like a field of wheat undulating in that chill fall breeze? Standing there on high, mesmerized, I felt that rock, hard and cool against my back; saw that waving field of wheat; and so, my mind dissolved backwards into that foregone moment.

The stone was cool, rough against my back, poking me as my chest heaved in ragged gasps. Some unaccountable woe lay heavy on my breast; so heavy did it feel, I looked down to discern whether some great weight were suckingly fastened there. Glancing down, my mind reeled, aghast at the red spattering there all across my chest and down my body.

That red spattering. I had been bound somewhere—and was in some great haste, or so it seemed. I had been to visit someone, I knew that much; but where had I been bound? Then, in a moment so abhorrent it nearly pitched me unknowing from the masthead, I gasped anew and remembered. The Walker’s home; I had been to the Walker’s home! Harriet and Jacob and their boy Johnny, not six months younger than my own Gennie.

Upon hearing those names in my mind’s ear, my whole body shuddered, remembering within the remembrance, as it were. I had been in some sort of rage, and had fairly run at the door to pound on it and demand Jacob’s presence, but then saw the Walker’s door stood slightly ajar; and, hearing what I thought to be voices from within, in a passion of rage I did not stop, but stiff-armed the door open, slamming it back against the wall as I rushed over the threshold. Curses were already spilling from my lips as I stormed into their parlor, though for the life of me I could not then remember the circumstance sending me into such a towering rage, enough to crash unbidden into their sumptuous home.

There in the parlour, Jacob appeared to be getting to his feet from the floor, slowly, and with what seemed some confusion. A stench as of a birthing room was in the air: blood and feces and anguish. As I began to yell at Jacob, he turned and I saw that something was terribly awry with his portly face: his eyes were of a cataract hue, and his face slack as if in sleep, his neck at an odd angle and what looked to be a terrible wound there, on his shoulder; and then he hissed, and moaned, and lurched toward me.

As he approached, I continued my invective, caring not how ill the man might be, for I had something to say to him, something important, it seemed. While yelling all the louder at his relentless approach, I made some violent gesture with my hand and felt there, warm in my grasp, the small kindling hatchet that usually resided nigh the hearth at home. This puzzled me, and I stood dumbly staring at it when Jacob lunged the final distance with startling speed and was upon me, slavering, moaning, spitting, grappling.

All I knew then was rage, for here, here I knew lay the source of that rage, though I still knew not the details; all felt as in a dream. The thing that had once been Jacob Walker bore me to the ground, both of us screaming, it grasping at my throat, striving to pull my head to its mouth, but when we landed and rolled, I chanced to be in the upper position. All rage in me was suddenly extinguished by gut-wrenching fear; out of instinct alone did I bring the hatchet down on his skull, and with a horrible wet crunching sound the hatchet blade sunk deep in Jacob’s skull and became irretrievably lodged there in the bone; stuck fast and useless now.

Before I could even attempt to wrench the hatchet free, aye, before even one breath could be drawn by me, another lesser weight crashed into me from the side, and I twisted away, scrabbling frantically to my feet and backing rapidly towards the dead fireplace. It was the boy! Johnny!

Horribly hissing, his teeth gnashed at me; he had a grip on my shirt but he was younger than my Gennie—Gennie!—and therefore slight, and so I easily dashed his hands from me and kicked him to the floor, retreating toward the fireplace, to place my back against the wall. A rattling clash startled me; in my haste I had knocked over the coal scuttle and the fireplace tools stored therein clattered to the floor. The boy silently advanced, clearly bent on taking my life. I retrieved the heavy poker at my feet and, to my horror, easily did what had to be done.

Home! I remembered thinking then, I must return home! My entire body was spattered with gore; and in revulsion, I threw the heavy poker on the small corpse (foolish man!) and fled the house, clinging to the hope that my family was yet safe; if only I could get there fast enough. I ran, striving with all my might to husband my rapidly waning faith in the goodness of the world. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and from these dead beliefs she gathers her most vital hope.

Grimly did I stand the rest of the watch there at the mast head, seething and confused. The Pequod rolled on through the vast patches of brit and the huge black backs of the right whales mowed through the golden food, reaping hither and yon, fearless of the Pequod. The sea undulated there around us all in her subtle profundities.

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried unmoving beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; who can say for sure that their beloved is truly gone beyond; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms without that knowledge. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections of the Holy sort to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave or been burned to stave off contamination or worse yet, infected and, love or no, lurch off all unknowing.

Consider all this, for just as this appalling ocean surrounds that once-verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

Chapter

The Kraken

Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet would be seen.

But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.

In the distance, an impossibly prodigious white mass lazily rose to the surface, and rising higher and higher, disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the African yelled out—“There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”

Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.

Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave orders for lowering.

The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, no less than four furlongs in length and at least one in breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of gigantic anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. The creature seemed stricken, as though struggling under some hemorrhagic hurt—writhing there on the billows, an unearthly, chance-like apparition of life that, had it been whole and hale, could have easily pulled the Peqoud down to its dark lair, there to feed upon it.

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again below, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild tremulous voice exclaimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”

“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.

“The greatest of squid, known by some as Kraken which, legends say, few ships ever beheld and returned to their ports to tell of it. Never have I heard that any crew of any ship ever truly saw such a thing. Had I not seen it with these eyes, never would I have thought it real. Surely the legends must be mistaken,” saying this last half-question and darting his gaze to Ahab.

Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as silently following.

Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so singularly unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean—nay! on the whole round globe—yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his only food. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the giant squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding one hundred fifty and even two hundred feet in length! Bishop Pontoppodan, writing in his natural history of Norway, fancies that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.

By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious Kraken, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish or squid family, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.

Chapter

The Line

With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.

The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, however much it may give it compactness and gloss.

Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian in his strength and darkness; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.

The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms.[1] Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded “sheaves,” or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the “heart,” or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese.

[1]1 fathom = 6 feet

As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists.

Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety’s sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea.

Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp—the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.

Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as mystic jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly.

Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

Perhaps very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam and shaft and wheel is grazing you.

It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other without the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action can you escape being made a Mazeppa[1] of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.

[1]Mazeppa: narrative poem by Lord Byron (1819), based on the legend of Ivan Mazeppa (1639-1709). According to the poem, the young Mazeppa was punished for cuckoldry by tying him naked to a wild horse and setting the horse loose. Most of the poem describes the traumatic journey aboard the horse.

Again: as the profound calm which precedes and prophesies of the storm is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair.

But why say more? All of us do live enveloped in whale-lines. All of us are born with halters round our necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

Chapter

Stubb
Kills a Whale

If to Starbuck the apparition of the Kraken was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different object. “When you see him big-ee ‘quid, him Kraken,” said the tattooed islander, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him big ‘parm whale.”

The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.

It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.

Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their soft-hissing crests like sleeping breaths; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.

Half-drowsing at the masthead there, the soft hiss of the sea and sparsely cloud-spackled sky did take my mind vividly backwards to a similar sound under a similar sky.

I lazed outside the ringing smithy on a small grass-covered hillock where, on the southward side I basked lizardlike in the sun, upwind from the smell of smoke and hot steel spewing from the smithy, half-sleeping in the sun and too sick in heart and body to care if any zomby found me there, for I had abandoned myself entirely to those mad weavers, the Fates; a profound fatalistic philosophy engulfed me in its illusory security. In truth “dazed” would suffice for my state of being, for the sudden absence of laudanum caused my whole body to ache and to shiver, to sweat and to itch; I was thankful the vomiting had subsided for the time.

All the long previous day and all morning the sound of pounding hammers had rung in the bright air, as though Hephaestus had borrowed Mjölnir and wielded its might for forging work. In my imagination it was the ringing of the zomby death knell, and I welcomed it, for now my rage was becoming more precisely—and therefore hotly—stoked, as the forest fire’s wild heat is to the engineered, white-hot heat of the forge fire, stoked by the leather lungs of the forge-bellows. All smithies across the land rang with such blows, and many hearts like mine were similarly stoked to rage. The rush to crush plowshares into swords was, of necessity, urgent.

This was no common smithy, however, being adjacent to the forge where the Liberty Bell had been cast, and the place where Dane axes first birthed in the New World. This smithy, founded generations ago by Danish master smith Jørgen Hummel, was the first to produce the American version of the Danish Axe; Hummel was a native of that country and had apprenticed himself under a master smith there before embarking for the Colonies. And, as his name did attest—it means “bumblebee”—Hummel busily applied himself and soon had his own New World smithy, where he began producing the style of Danish axe that proved so useful in the hewing of timber. I knew from my laudanum vision of the aforementioned change to the axe’s poll, or butt, that it would be useful crushing the heads of zombies. As I have previously and at length addressed the large and the small of these axes, I will say no more.

Soon, but not soon enough for my impatience, the blades were done. Hummel’s great-grandson, now a man of graying hair himself, with arms like sides of beef presented them to me, then went so far as to assist me in finding the perfect length for the white ash hafts of each. They were the finest of weapons and soon became my most prized possessions. Hummel requested the use of the axehead design, it being such a fine one for that grisly task, and I assented. From all appearances, Hummel made no small fortune from my largesse, for this axe has become a veritable symbol of that war,—at least within the Militia—and many are the men and some few women who yet wield it.

Though anxious to embark upon my newfound fatalist quest for zomby slaughter, I first stopped to visit Augie Kohler, a bosom friend who had long been a railroad man, riding many a time into the wilds of the western territories. I inveigled him to sell to me a new pair of clear-lensed cinder goggles, forcing the money upon him, for he did not want to take it.

Cinder goggles—as you no doubt know if you have traveled by steam train—serve to keep from your eyes the burning cinders that fly backwards from the smokestack of the stoked locomotive. As window glazing has but recently been included on only the most luxurious passenger cars, most are open to the air and to blinding danger; many are the passengers who cry out as a hot cinder is blown burningly back to their compartment. Cinder goggles were ideal for protecting one’s eyes from the spattering of infectious zomby gore. Coupled with a prodigious bandana which I snugly wrapt round my nose and mouth, I was thus girded for further battle.

From that day forth, Ishmael gave way to fate, letting those three sisters weave me where they would. Soon, no longer so sickened by lack of laudanum, a Militia band took me in, and before three months had elapsed, I became its leader, my reputation spreading near as rapid as the plague, for trusting in the Fates lends one a Power undreamt by the more timid. It would take more than a year before I found myself with the strength to return to that cabin hewn with these rough hands, and there to finish what should have been done ere I fled. Of that deed I will not yet write, for I cannot; it remains beyond my strength and beyond any inner vision. When I try to conjure forth those days prior to shipping aboard the Pequod, I remember only staring for long hours into the churning, bubbling current of the brook that burbled just north of our cabin; nothing more will come to me, and yet I sense it lurking there, in wait.

Bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes then; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to the present moment. And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror. All of that past time was dashed from my mind as I gazed down astounded at the whale’s vast bulk.

But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with three notes from aloft including my own startled shout, I say these voices burst forth with the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.

“Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the tiller.

The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.

“There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb’s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker’s boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.

Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he was going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he brewed.[1]

[1]It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharp-pointed New York pilot-boat.

“Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves, though; take plenty of time—but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s all,” cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now; give ‘em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy—start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the word—easy, easy—only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and like the plague do ye but raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys—that’s all. Start her!”

“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke which the eager Indian gave.

But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee-hee! Kee-hee!” yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage.

“Ka mate! Ka ora! Au Au Aue a!” howled Queequeg, passionately. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard—“Stand up, Tashtego!—give it to him!”

The harpoon was hurled.

“Stern all!” The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was the magical line! An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe and that smoke smelled not unlike that sweeter herb Queequeg and I sometimes shared from his wild tomahawk pipe. As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb’s hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.

“Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.[1] More turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed places—stem for stern—a staggering business truly in that rocking commotion.

[1]Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.

From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would have thought the craft had two keels—one cleaving the water, the other the air—as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at once. A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of   Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight.

“Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman; facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another fling.

The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like crimson devils. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance by the line attached to it, Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.

“Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along the fish’s flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish.

And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, and with spasmodic vibrations, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that vibrating twilight into the clear air of day.

And now, his juddering flurry abated, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea came the final shuddering vibration that spasmed through the vast beast. His heart had burst!

“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.

“Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.

Chapter

The Dart
&
the Crotch

A word concerning an incident in the last chapter. According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from the ship with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now, it needs a strong, nervous arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one’s compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started—what that is none know but those who have tried it.

For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!

Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat.

Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.

To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.

The crotch alluded to previously deserves independent mention. It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall or I grab my axe from my back. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and second irons.

Furthermore: it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently practicable. When the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. You are likely not surprised this critical act is not always unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties. Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse.

Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling about him. And yet for all their fatal flailings, rather would I face them than even one zomby, for the rampant iron but threatens a clean death or at least a maiming, whereas with a zomby there is a risk more unclean and infectiously fearful, even from a maiming; and more besides, for though you smash his skull and so take what might be called his life, still, some spattered gore may strike your open mouth, or smack you stingingly in the unprotected eye, and though you won the battle, yet you lost the war, and life to boot; worse yet, if you are not sent on your way, so to speak, you will Quicken to join the slavering ranks of the very enemy that did just overwhelm you.

All these particulars are faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.

Chapter

Stubb's Supper

Stubb had killed the whale some distance from the ship. The sea remained calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.

Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the cabin in some hurry, and did not come forward again until morning.

Though in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object.

Very soon you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod’s decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel’s, and seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two—ship and whale—seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.[1]

[1]A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility, even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat in order to put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad flukes or lobes.

If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck, for he appeared there but rarely while the whale was converted to oil, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.

“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his small!”

Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray the current expenses of the war (a philosophy embraced by Militia and only one reason that group is so reviled), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.

About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale’s flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. The mark they thus leave on the whale may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips.

“Cook, Cook!—where’s that old Fleece?” he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; “Cook, you Cook!—sail this way, Cook!”

The old man, not in any very high glee at having been previously roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shuffling along from his galley, for, like many old men, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him on account of his hair, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old shipboard chef floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play.

“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, “don’t you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been beating this steak too much, Cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks now over the side, don’t you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they’re kicking up! Cook, go and talk to ‘em; tell ‘em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, Cook, and deliver my message. Here, take this lantern,” snatching one from his sideboard; “now then, go and preach to ‘em!”

Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.

“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say that you must stop that dam noise dere. You hear? Stop that dam smackin’ of da lip! Stubb say you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop that dam racket!”

“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the shoulder, startling the old man badly, as he nearly pitched into the fray below—“Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way when you’re preaching. That’s no way to convert sinners, Cook!”

“What? Then preach to him youself,” sullenly turning to go.

“No, Cook, I’m sorry, truly I am; pray go on, go on.”

“Well, then, B’loved fellow-critters:”—

“Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ‘em to it; try that,” and Fleece continued.

“You is all sharks, and by nature wery woracious, yet I say to you, fellow-critters, that that woraciousness—stop that dam slappin’ of de tail! How you think to hear, if’n you keep up such a dam slappin’ and bitin’ dere?”

“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him in a jocular way, “I won’t have that swearing. Talk to ‘em gentlemanly.”

Once more the sermon proceeded.

“Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; that is nature, and can’t be helped; but to govern that wicked nature, that is de point. You is sharks, sartin; but if you govern de shark in you, why then you be angel; for all angels is nothin’ more than de shark well governed. Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be civil, a helping yourselfs from that whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbour’s mouth, I say. Is not one shark got as good a right as t’other to that whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to that whale; that whale b’long to somebody else. I know some o’ you gots a wery big mouf, bigger than others; but then de big moufs sometimes has de small bellies; so that de bigness of de mouf is not to swaller with, but to bite off de blubber for de small fry of sharks, what can’t get up courage to help themselves.”

“Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go on.”

“No use goin’ on; de dam villains will keep a scougin’ and slappin’ each other; dey don’t hear one word; no use a-preaching to such dam gluttons till they bellies is full, and they bellies is bottomless; and when they do get ‘em full, they won’t hear you then; for then they sink in the sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can’t hear nothing’ at all, no more, for ever and ever.”

“Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece, and I’ll away to my supper.”

Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his shrill voice, and cried—

“Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam bellies ‘till they bust—and then die.”

“Now, Cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; “stand just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular attention.”

“All ‘tention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the desired position.

“Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; “I shall now go back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you, Cook?”

“What that to do with de steak,” said the old man, testily.

“Silence! How old are you, Cook?”

“’Bout ninety, they say,” he gloomily muttered.

“And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, Cook, and don’t know yet how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting another mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the question. “Where were you born, Cook?”

“’Hind de hatchway, in a ferry-boat, goin’ over de Roanoke.”

“Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what country you were born in, Cook!”

“Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried sharply.

“No, you didn’t, Cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, Cook. You must go home and be born over again; you don’t know how to cook a whale-steak yet.”

“Bless my soul if I cook another one,” he growled, angrily, turning round to depart.

“Come back here, Cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take that bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be? Take it, I say”—holding the tongs towards him—“take it, and taste it.”

Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old man muttered, “Best cooked ‘teak I ever done tasted; joosy, verry joosy.”

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

“Passed one once in Cape-Town,” said the old man disdainfully.

“And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his beloved fellow-creatures, have you, Cook! And yet you come here, and tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?” said Stubb. “Where do you expect to go to, Cook?”

“Go to bed verrry soon,” he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.

“Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, Cook. It’s an awful question. Now what’s your answer?”

“When this old black man dies,” said the man slowly, changing his whole air and demeanor, “he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some blessed angel will come and fetch him.”

“Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him where?”

“Up there,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very solemnly.

“So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, Cook, when you are dead? But don’t you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets? Main-top, eh?”

“Didn’t say that t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks.

“You said up there, didn’t you? and now look yourself, and see where your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the lubber’s hole,[1] Cook; but, no, no, Cook, you don’t get there except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It’s a ticklish business, but must be done, or else it’s no go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, Cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t’other a’top your heart, when I’m giving my orders, Cook. What! that your heart, there?—that’s your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!—that’s it—now you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention.”

[1]A hole in a platform on a mast, allowing the faint of heart to ascend without venturing out on the treacherous shrouds.

“All ‘tention,” said the old man, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time.

“Well then, Cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don’t you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear? And now to-morrow, Cook, when we are cutting-in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, Cook. There, now ye may go.”

But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.

“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear? away you sail, then.—Halloa! Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t forget.”

“Wish whale’d eat him ‘stead of him eatin’ whale, by gor! I’m blessed if he ain’t more of a shark than Mister Shark hisself,” muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.

Chapter

Eating
Whale Brains

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.

The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil. Aglakti, one of their most famous shamans, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing.

The spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made.

But aside from Stubb and the Captain, it is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, you dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronise nothing but steel pens.

In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf’s head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.

Upon cracking open, at last, this whale’s brain case, a thing occurred that seemed passing strange at the time. Amid much grumbling recrimination from the forecastle, Ahab did requisition these and subsequently all whale brains taken upon this voyage and, with Fedallah, he greedily took them in a raw state to the cabin below.[1] Here, I do believe, was the moment the seed planted by Archy months ago began to take root in Bulkington’s brain.

[1]There is no small controversy in circles of the learnéd as to the predilection of the zomby for brains. To be certain, it will devour all it can of any living flesh, but I know zombies to have a particular fondness for brains, and have come upon many a zomby gnawing away at a stubborn skull, but because of the mechanics of its jaw and the not inconsiderable thickness of the human skull—some more thick than others, it should be noted—and the brainbox being designed to be not gotten into in any wise, other than through the senses and mayhap reason; I say, because of the skullbone’s impregnability, the zomby does not often succeed in what some think to be its goal, that is, to eat brains; and so it does often content itself with eating faces, for the face is the flesh closest to that pinkly convoluted thinking organ it finds so enticing.

But in spite of this evidence, it is known among those who have rigorously experimented with such grisly things, that, given opportunity and choice, your zomby will be drawn more quickly, more violently and will strive against each other most frighteningly when brains are made available. I cannot not speak to exactly why this may be, and certainly will not speak as to how nor where such experiments are undertaken, but suffice to say that there are many in the world who know much and say little; and there, thou Platonists, is a knotty riddle to ponder by flickering light on thy cave wall.

Chapter

Zombology[1]

[1]Of late, perhaps due to some confusion with its Haitian cousin, many now use the alternate spelling: zombie. On this dry subject here be it said that, as a lover of lexicons and as an accomplished, prize-winning amateur etymologist, I hold to the correctness of the more ancient spelling, and use the “-ie” suffix only when pluralizing the creature; and under such circumstances—that is to say, pluralized—are zombies most dreadfully dangerous. Especially for the zomby is it true that many hands make for short work.

So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of zombies, the ensuing chapter, in all its parts, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair.

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; already are we lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the festering barnacled hull of that vilest undying leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special zombological revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.

Ye tender of heart or delicate of constitution, read on at your own peril and, if you boldly choose to go, insure your smelling salts are close to hand, for I shall ere long paint for you something like the true form of the zomby as it actually appears to the eye of the Militia warrior—who knows it best—when in its own absolute body the zomby is annihilated so that it can be fairly stepped upon, dismembered, disemboweled, and disembrained to be examined there where it lies. No less important is additional knowledge gleaned from the logbooks of Ahab wherein he expounded at great length upon two additional genera of the zomby unfamiliar even to the Militia. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the less informed. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving that some such pictures of the zomby are mistaken.

It is some systematized exhibition of the zomby in his broad genera that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down, few though they be.

“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Zombology,” says Commander General Romero, former leader in combatting the latest manifestation of the zomby plague in this country, in California, who, upon receiving a grievous zomby-induced wound, for his remaining days turned his genius to zomby consultation until that inevitable time when, the disease progressing to its ultimate conclusion, his assistant was instructed to crush his skull with one swift blow. “It is not my intention,” he is known to have said before that fatal day, “were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the zomby into groups and families. Utter confusion exists among the historians of this heinous creature.”

Thus also speak many other preeminent zomby scholars such as Brooks, bold Grahame Smith, and the trio of Mogk, McGuire, and Ma who have shed the lights of zoology, anatomy, and history on the subject. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with zombology, or the science of zombies. Many are the men and women, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, warriors and priests, harlots and homemakers who have at large or in little, written of the zomby. Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible (for who is Lazarus but a zomby sanctified?); Aristotle; Pliny; Dr. Schlozman; Sir Verstynen; Voytek; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Sir William Hinzman; Lowther, Tiller & Conkle; Austin; J.R. Angelalla; Wallace; Murphy; Talluto; T.W. Long; Barnhart; Bourne; Kirkman & Moore; Tufo; Hocking; Luethke; Magnum; and the legendary Reverend Zed. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show.

Of the names in this list of zomby authors, only those following Bourne ever saw a zomby in the flesh, as it were; and but seven of the scholars thus far mentioned were a real professional soldier in the latest war. I mean, of course, the septet of Romero, Kirkman, Moore, Brooks, Mogk, Ma, and McGuire. Doughty blades all.

There are only three books, to my knowledge, which at all pretend to put the zomby before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Romero’s illustrated history of the Undead, the astute investigations of McGuire, and the prolific work of Brooks and Mogk. In addition to his books, Romero’s visual body of work must be particularly lauded, for his many experiments and autopsy-floor inventions are indispensable to all authors thus far listed, myself included, all of whom stand on his venerable old shoulders.

The original matter touching the zomby, so far as it goes, is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description, or storytelling of the truest sort, or well-informed speculation and only occasionally wild flights of fancy. As yet, however, the zomby, scientific, prosaic, or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other undead creatures, its is a largely unwritten lifelessness.

The various species of zombies need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or—in this place at least—to much of any description. My object here is simply to proffer the draft of a systematization of zombology. I am the architect, not the builder.

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the void after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very scrotum of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the rotting nose of this horror! I have swam through libraries and forced my way through forests to fight the undead; I have had to do with zombies with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.

From all I gleaned from extant literature in my researches, tomes both ancient and modern, and no small amount of first-hand accounts, I submitted these findings to my friends, Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both acquaintances whose opinions, knowledge, and wisdom are much revered among the Militia. Sim and Charley united in the opinion that the reasonings set forth in some theories were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were some of them utter humbug. Those so deemed by Charley and agreed upon by myself and Sim I have discarded, but there is yet some clarity to be won from this muddle.

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Zombology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact that, in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a zomby be but living or dead. Let us settle this issue for good and all.

In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, “I hereby separate the zomby from the ranks of the living.”  The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the zomby from the phylogenetic taxonomy of the living, he states thus: “On account of their cold unthumping heart, their unbellowed lungs, their unblinking eyelids, their hollow, death-sharpened ears,—for what greater silence is there to hear from than the ultimate silence of death—their snuffling nose, penem non oritur, pectus dat non lac,” and finally, “comedunt carnem vivere.”  To hear so definitively from such an august figure as that great classifier Linnaeus, the matter is settled; there is not life in the common zomby. But there are some creatures lumped with the zomby that are not zombies properly, and of these, each will be refuted in turn.

It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. The name zomby likely came from its first human iteration in prehistory on the dark continent, where the Kikongo call it zumbi and the Kimbundu dub it nzambi. Philologically considered, it is likely his name arose from those African languages aforementioned, but even here in the new world, those who speak the Spanish tongue have legends passed from the Aztecs and Olmecs of those one-and-the same creatures called sombra.

Of my own knowledge, earned through harrowing experience in libraries, I know that down to this very year, 1852, in that tiny dark isle of Haiti, there are still found those called zombie, or in that language zonbi (similar to the nzumbe of the Mbundu tongue): men and women whose souls were caught by some shifty shaman and held in shackled servitude, but as far as my researches can tell, these are not proper zombies, or at any rate, not such as I have come to know them, for these Hatian creatures neither slaver nor eat flesh and indeed are warm to the touch and are possessed of a beating heart. These insular zombies we can ignore and bid them cleave to that mystic Haitian isle where they will trouble us not.

Next: How shall we define the zomby? By his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? Indeed. To be short, then, the Zomby Ultima—his final form, and the most virulent—is a creature, a former human being who, upon expiring, has in him the tiniest spore, which sprouts in that damp inner darkness to send slithering invisible fingers of mycelium that then causes him to rise again after a dire fever—to Quicken. The former human is then a zomby; become a pale thing, soon foul-smelling as the most deliquescent fungus; a fiend from out the very bowels of hell’s imagination; had hell a hell of its own, there would you find the zomby, bent on devouring all the living motile creatures it may encounter. As stated previously, the zomby prefers brains above all things, but such sweetmeats, for all but the most determined and patient zomby, are out of reach behind that wondrous bony lockbox, the skull.

There is no small debate as to whether any residual of human consciousness yet lurks in the zomby’s corpus. It is from no small amount of my own experience with these matters that I put forth here that there may indeed be some influence upon the zomby by the person from which it was spawned. The behaviors of particular zombies, I assert, are influenced by the predilections of the human it once was. Granted, naught remains within the zomby corpus but a festering tangle of twitchy switches, but in some way are these yet connected to a source of power, as a miller’s water wheel that spins but is not connected to the grindstone. As you will learn anon, the zomby in its own particularity does act in distinct ways, and this I do believe to be that residual alluded to above.

So, there you have him, your zomby of the ultimate stage, found only in human form, for no animal yet known to have been bitten by a zomby lives for long, and what is more, when that animal dies it remains dead; there is no Quickening, no reanimation. However protracted, that definition of zomby is the result of expanded meditation. Others with less thought involved have mistakenly misidentified other creatures and called him zomby, regarding which, these refutations; to wit:

The Mummy: A mummy may have once been dead like a zomby, and is now motile in a similar manner to the zomby, but the mummy is not a zomby, because it is preserved, and does not devour living flesh, nor does the mummy rot and stink like the zomby, possessing instead a not unpleasant, dry, dusty odor. A curious similitude however, can be seen in the upraised arms and slow shuffling gait, but the difference lies chiefly in the fact that the mummy wants only to throttle you, or to curse you, while the zomby will scratch, claw, bite and rip your intestines from you as you watch.

The Vampyre: A vampyre is not a zomby, for though he also is reanimated, and does devour—in his own fashion—yet he is not an unreasoning, slavering creature but instead sports a sly savagery and fiendish wit. True, like the zomby, the vampyre, if he bites and devours not, makes more of his kind, but this is a superficial similarity, the mechanism for which is altogether different. Finally, as any fool can state, no zomby known has ever flown, nor ever is likely to do so, lest it be a short fatal flight from a high rooftop where you did lure it to its doom from some safely adjacent building.

The “Adam” of Frankenstein’s labors: Finally, the beast created by Victor von Frankenstein is also set apart from the ranks of the zomby, for although it, too, has been re-animated, it is not a biological Quickening, but is instead a product of science. Also, Frankenstein’s Adam is neither mindless nor savagely bent on devouring all the living, but is a creature whose intelligence and refinement are not matched by its outer shell; a malady shared by perhaps all humanity. Such creatures are to be pitied, not feared.

Therefore, to all who may hold certain confusions, no matter how convicted, the preceding abominations are most decidedly and by definition not included in the domain zomby. With a dismissive wave, we banish them from this treatise and move on to its proper subject.

First: According to magnitude of danger—a tricky subject as shall be seen—and the relative rarity which exists as an inverse relationship to the former, which is to say that the less common the zomby, the more dangerous it is. Thus, according to characteristics evinced by each type, I divide the zombies into three primary Books (subdivisible into Chapters), and these shall comprehend them all; in addition I have appended a fourth book which lists briefly some of the heroic sub-species of homo sapiens sapiens who do battle against the zomby.

Book I (Duodecimo): Zomby Ultima
Book II (Octavo): Zomby Penultima
Book III (Folio): Zomby Ante Omnes
Book IV (Appendix): Homo Sapiens Venatores

As the type of the Duodecimo, I will present the Zomby Ultima, known by most as the Common Zomby, or simply Zomby, which comes in the most profligate array and, being the zomby type of which most are now aware—at least in the contiguous United States and the northernmost environs of Mexico—it is the one with which most concern themselves and which is the most immediately dangerous; of the Octavo, I will present the Zomby Penultima, of which, despite the name’s implication, there may be many types, each with varied intellectual, moral, and spiritual predilections; of the Folio, I present the only member of that thin but vital chapter, the Zomby Ante Omnes, primary mover for the whole of the quickened dead’s species, greatest in size; its intellectual or moral spirit unknowable. I beg of ye: Look beyond the common zomby; for the devil you do battle with in front of you may blind you to the larger Lucifer looming close behind.

These zombies are hereby ranked according to size from smallest to largest, and within each category from least to most perilous. The broad distinctions herein also are presented from least to most perilous. All this you shall understand forthwith. So Ishmael: tend to your quill with the same care as you sharpen your axe, and to it.

Book I (Duodecimo): Zomby Ultima

Conventions being what they are, that is to say, both regionally and circumstantially originating, it will be no surprise to the astute reader that, indeed, more than one moniker may be applied to the profligate number of zombies herein presented. I but relate the nomenclature as used by Militia on the field of battle. As many know, there is no small amount of black humor in the trenches, and I make no apology for anything indecorous included here.

It should be noted that, in addition to these classifications, there also exist among the Militia, other naming conventions, mentioned earlier in the brief encounter Queequeg and I had in New Bedford with what I then called a soloist, which is to say a single zomby. As these classifications provide little information beyond numbers, I will exclude them from this chapter, but any imaginative reader can easily envision trios, quartets, and so forth, up to the full orchestra, a site few see and hear and yet live to tell of the performance.

Also, before proceeding further, some clarity is necessary as to race. Some pretend to see a difference between the New Zealand and Australian zomby, or the English and the French zomby, or the African and the Asian zomby, or—most especially of late—the Mexican and the Union zomby. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical racial distinction, for the zomby are as one race bent on one thing only. It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.

In various sorts of zombies, they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the zomby-naturalists has split. The tack I take is to present the zomby in some Euclidian-like purity of form, as it were, and allow the reader, from his or her own experience, to note the possible combinatorial details. Among the main category of zomby ultima above can be found any number of phylum, including the following:

Chapter I. Headless Zomby; Ichabod Zomby

Simply put, this is a severed yet still-slavering head. His great lips present a cable-like aspect, if they have not been deformed into slashed folds of flesh from its insensate feeding. Its grand distinguishing feature, the teeth, are often most conspicuous for he will gnash and slaver and you can hear its teeth clacking together till they break; the Ichabod has been known to drag itself slowly by the teeth alone toward a victim; this type of zomby is no winner of races.

On flat new-mown grass, or on a trampled battlefield, the Ichabod can be plainly seen projecting from the surface, is relatively easily despatched, and therefore poses little danger. However, beware!, for this zomby is a sneaky sort; bushy terrain, or tall grass, and in water—both floating and submerged—this zomby poses a dire threat, for dangers concealed are those that most often take us down. Creating such a zomby—which is to say, beheading one—is known among Militia as “Craning,” this being, of course, the gerund derived from Ichabod’s surname.

The only benefit regarding the Ichabod is the ease with which the head may later be staved in. It is best to prop the head face-down against a hard surface, preferably in some corner, thereby steadying the thing. Billy Langdon did once swing at such an unsecured head and instead of crushing the skull, his mace made of it a kicking ball and that ball smacked right into Billy’s own bare calf where the ball took a bite, and then we had to let Billy drink himself to death with the last of our pilfered moonshine before crushing his skull.

Stand aside, I say! and ever ware the teeth and any other fluids; let such never touch thy own wet parts; such advice is of value in many a dire situation, not limited to zomby encounters.

Chapter II. Zomby Philosopher; Thoreau, etc.

Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly surfacing in the remotest and most sullen woods; his straight posture when uninjured and his solitary nature make this zomby rise like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power of solitude, as possessed by natural philosophers, this zomby prefers to wander wild places alone. Take heed however, for despite its solitary nature and its predilection for squirrels and other easily caught rodents, it is yet a zomby and if given a fair chance, will rip from thee thine innards and greedily choke down thy red essence.

Of philosopher zombies there are endless varieties: your Platonist, your Kantian, Confucianist, or what have you. When one of these solitary zombies is particularly ugly, something of an accomplishment, for all zombies are hideous; however, I say that when a particularly hideous specimen is discovered, we tend to call such a Thoreau.

There are as many types of zomby philosophers as there are philosophers. Many a joke have I made by ending such debates as to the particular philosophical school of some given zomby by stating that all are Epicureans, for are they not free of fear?; are they not free of bodily pain?; do they not seek always to eat? Were they capable of thought or speech, the credo of all zombies is Epicurean in nature, stated thus: “If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.”

Chapter III. Legless Zomby; Topmast Zomby; Bombay Beggar

These are frightfully common zombies, for they are created when some poor wight succumbs, often to a quartet or quintet, and his innards are ripped from him and devoured. This, of course, kills the wight, but also sows the spore of its resurrection; whereupon it attempts to rise after Quickening, only to discover its upper torso separating from the lower; and so, leglessly, does the Bombay Beggar reach up its begging, grasping hands for any scrap of flesh you are willing to throw down to it.

Chapter IV. Drouged Zomby; Lord Byron; Le Diable Boiteux

As will be treated in more detail later, whalemen use a process whereby—when many whales are present—a fleeing whale is slowed with a drogue in order to more easily return and kill it. In the case of the zomby, such drouging may take many forms, however, most easily done is a quick slash at the Achilles tendon or the hamstring, or severing the torso at the small of the back. Taking off the head may also technically make a drouged zomby of the remaining animate head; however, due to the dangerous nature of loose heads in general, they require a category of their own, on which topic we have already discoursed.

If the zomby is still able to limp along, as with a club foot, he is called a Lord Byron, or simply a Byron. Those more learnéd among the Militia call such a one, le diable boiteux, French for “the limping devil,” and the designation Byron some times used to refer to himself.

Chapter V. Whitman Zomby

The popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him. His scalp is not very valuable. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the zombies, making more gay foam at the mouth and more freshets of blood, and seems to thus enjoy himself more generally than any other of them. The Whitman Zomby will eat anything when hungry, but prefers young virile men; and for this reason, the Whitman is seldom seen, for its choice of prey—they being fit and in no way amenable to being eaten—do most often destroy the Whitman with some ease.

Chapter VI. Casanova Zomby

Though he, too, as all zombies, will eat anything in a pinch, this zomby type most prefers to feed on nubile young women.

Chapter VII. Mariner Zomby; Coleridge Zomby

This zomby can be found in water, and is good example of the way in which zomby types are easily combined. For example, one might see in a small pond or lake, what is known as a Mariner, or a Coleridge, and upon closer inspection, you notice that it is missing its lower half, as in the Bombay Beggar, or Topmast Zomby. This provides no end of diverting names to be given, such as Coleridge Beggar, Bombay Mariner, and so forth. In addition, a particularly old and rotten or water-bloated zomby is often called an Ancient Mariner, this additional designation adding no small variety to the plethora of possible monikers.

Chapter VIII. Mythical Zombies: The Zomby Unicorn

Never would I hold that all zombies are herein depicted, nor would I ascribe to a belief that I have seen all zomby types that may be in existence. Quite the opposite, in point of fact, and for this reason I do here list at least one zomby of which I have heard much round Militia campfires, but which I have not yet seen with my own eyes.

But just as many tall tales are based on some distant kernel of truth, it may not be wise to ignore all stories. The zomby of which I now treat has many names: unizomby, unicorn zed, rhino zomby, and nomenclature variously drawing on the fungal theme: fungiform zomby, fun guy, fungus amungus, and suchlike pretty exclamations. Whatever name it is given, this zomby has a growth sprouting from its head, variously reported as penile in shape, sprouting from its ear, a nostril, an empty eye socket, the back of the head, sprouting from the crown of the head, and even growing out from the throat and through the mouth. It has been variously described as writhing, glowing, and pulsing and in darkness has been seen to emit a faint blue glow.

I have not seen it, but, ere long, you shall read of its description by one who has not only seen it, but cultivated it in a captive zomby, the better to harvest and make use of its special properties. I speak, of course, of the ancient Parsee mystic, Fedallah, as written of by Captain Ahab.

Through the Pequod’s log, I have learned that such a zomby as this is, in fact, real. From the log, I later learned that this rare fruit grows best from the forehead, just between the brows, with its mycelium roots threaded intricately through the pineal gland that sits above and behind the eyes, an organ which, in some mystic circles, is thought to be the seat of the all-seeing third eye. Though in the wild, as it were, such a mushroom may indeed sprout from out myriad natural holes in the skull, yet that pulsing fruit is most hearty when it springs from out a hole in the foremost part of the skull, nigh that mystic gland aforementioned.

Vander, a Militiaman of my troupe whom you will meet later in this tale, drew from his one short whaling voyage much inspiration in the naming of things associated with our Militia band’s slaughter of the undead. He it was who dubbed this curious substance zombergris, the origins of which term will soon become clear.

Zombergris is purported to have special properties, and is rumored to be many things: an aphrodisiac; a charm that, if worn around the neck will repel any zomby attack; an antidote to zomby infection, and much more besides. Until such time as I observe this phenomena for myself, I will say no more of it, though knowledge of this substance and its particulars will inform much of the rest of this tale.

Book II (Octavo): Zomby Penultima

Of all zombies herein presented, this genera is most elusive and little is known of the extent of its range and presence in society. Therefore, speculation upon its type and presence necessarily behooves me to present this Book as mere skeleton, as it were. Upon completion of this voyage and absorbing the contents of Ahab’s log, it is my suspicion that there have been no small number of this type of zomby throughout history.

It appears that the Zomby Penultima is, if given the proper treatment, well-nigh immortal. Some there are in the world (such as Fedallah), who, upon learning the secret of longevity, and by special application of zombergris, are able to extend their lifetime well beyond that of mortal man. Without this treatment, it appears this type of zomby eventually succumbs to the Zomby Ultima form, thereby becoming slavering, mindless and as incredibly voracious as it is incredibly infectious.

The type remains largely a secret, for it possesses all the wily intelligence of the human it once was. Though its specifics are still mysterious, piecing together clues from Ahab’s log have given me much information that has been previously unavailable regarding this creature.

In light of this, I hereby present a mere incomplete framework, ready for input from more knowledgeable scholars.

Chapter I. Leaders, Conquerors & Explorers

It may be advisable to re-examine past histories, for any rational being, knowing the truth of the information contained herein—needs must question the origins of such august or terrible figures as Alexander, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, and Napoleon, to name but a few of the most famous conquerors. Reflecting upon her condition, Joan of Arc was known to say, “One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”

The great explorer Captain Cook, on St. Valentine’s Day in 1779, was killed by Chief Kalanimanokahoowaha when, upon Cook’s return to the garden isle, the Hawaiian warrior discovered Cook’s true nature and crushed his skull. As Ahab is both an explorer and conqueror of sorts, he might well be listed here.

Chapter II. Rogues & Criminals

This group consists of the great criminals, despots, and murderers spattered throughout human history, fiends such as the Lion Men of Tanganyika; Chinese mass-murderer Liu Pengli (144 BC); or the compatriot of Joan of Arc (likely infected by her), Gilles de Rais (1404-1440), who abducted and killed near 800 peasant boys; Hungarian Elizabeth Báthory tortured to death some 650 girls and young women before she was found out in 1610.

Finally, I bring us up to the present-day Zomby Penultimae and offer up as crowned king of this Chapter, Thugee Behram, Indian assassin, and most prodigious killer. According to several scholarly sources, just one technique Thug Behram used—strangling victims with a ceremonial cloth—was, between 1740 and 1830, responsible for 931 deaths. Note Behram’s long life. Note also that the Thugee cult of assassins—likely with many Zomby Penultimae in its upper ranks—I say, the Thuggee assassins were responsible for the murders of one millions of people from 1730 to 1830.

I will say no more, but ask of ye to consider those heinous and noble acts of history in light of this knowledge. More research is required.

Book III (Folio): Zomby Ante Omnes

The Zomby Ante Omnes is, without doubt, the largest zomby inhabitant of the globe by girth; the most majestic and terrible in aspect; and lastly, by far the most dangerous in battle, not only by reason of its great girth; but also the dire fact that this is the only creature from which that vile contagion is initially spread. Zomby Ante Omnes is the source of all zomby plagues throughout history; from this foul fount do all subsequent zomby infestations flow; the Zomby Ante Omnes is the great original. More of his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon.

The creature’s predilection for wilder, uninhabited parts of the world make encounters with it more than passing rare, and there appears to be no more than a single Zomby Ante Omnes in existence at any one time. Among the Romans of old, such a proto-zomby was known as the Immortui; by the Dutch it is known as the Ondoden, and Mānsēra dōkāna lōka by the Bengali, the present teveqel of the Albanians, and the Jiāngshī of the Chinese, and the VandelndetoteOmneseele of the Long Words.

Some centuries ago, Zomby Ante Omnes was wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, for few of the scant number foolish enough or unlucky enough to meet such a one manage to escape ingestion. Those few who have been wounded by Zomby Ante Omnes and yet lived to return from that wilderness to infect a larger population, this number is, even now, vanishingly small.

Not til modern man appeared with his ships and technologies, thereby allowing explorers to range about the wide world; I say, not until this came to pass did zombies begin to shamble forth in the great numbers seen today. None see as much of this watery globe as a whaleman, and yet never have I heard of any encounter with such a creature as a Zomby Ante Omnes from any sailor, despite many a tall tale of the Kraken and other horrors of a night in the forecastle. And so, by its very scarcity, I reason that Zomby Ante Omnes is a solitary creature; only an individual is suffered to live at one time upon the earth, for what reason God only knows.

And here is the final danger, and the greatest. For though all that are born to this world must one day face death yea, even unto the common zomby who lives an uncommon long time; it is not so for Zomby Ante Omnes for, from the truthfully told tales of others and my own first-hand experience, I have seen that somehow the pestilence does not devour the Zomby Ante Omnes. Any may deduce that a zomby of such size and ferocity is well-nigh impossible to destroy; especially so in the body of a huge sperm whale, in which, as you shall soon learn, the cranium is buried a fathom beneath the flesh; to attempt to crush the beast’s cranium is a task to be taken up only by those cracked with insanity!

And unless I miss the mark entire, you, my friend, I say you, dear reader, have previously divulged that Moby Dick is such a one; Moby Dick is the current Zomby Ante Omnes upon this weird watered world, and Ahab the madman to give it battle.

Book IV (Appendix): Homo Sapiens Venatores

This final book I reserve for humanity, for in the matter of the zomby will we not have the final say? Will we not beat back the undead and bury and burn them for good and all, every time they lurch forth, as we have in past ages down to the brood of Ahab’s first rejected consort? One may hope.

The chapters listing all types of zomby hunter are endless as the variety of the human being who slays it; and as hinted earlier, I shall leave the filling in of this Book to all who would fain do so. Herein I treat of zomby warriors found in legend, spoken of in hushed tones round bivouac fires.

But first, a word concerning the general disdain in which the Militia is held. It goes against all sense that the men and women in the Militia are so despised by our fellow citizens. What irony! that one who performs so vital a duty is so shunned by those protected by their sacrifice. Any who has not participated in the slaughter can but little understand, for no imagination is prodigiously twisted enough to envision the reality of cleaving a zomby child’s head from its body; it is an act not easily recovered from. Freedom has never been easily won; and yet many there are who know this not, or choose to ignore the fact.

And yet, upon some reflection, that very act is but one reason the Militia are so reviled: we kill those who were once, and are still loved by those yet human. We slay former husbands and wives, former uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and oh burning anguish!, former children. No small wonder then, that we are, wherever we go, shunned from polite society. One does not mention one’s part in this profession; and to proffer a calling card with ZV or M upon it (Zomby Venatore; Militia) will gain you nothing but a swift exit, mayhap with a boot to your backside.

And there is more reason besides for this leper-like shunning (outcast!, unclean!), for though few in number, some there are who have deigned to proffer among the zomby scalps brought for bounty, no small number of human scalps, all ill-gotten, no doubt. Thus do unscrupulous rogues deal double damage, for not only do they take the life of a clean soul, but, like Judas, they earn a coin for it. When those of my band discover such a one, it is his scalp (it is always a man who acts thus), I say it is his scalp that is then added to our own withered collection bound for the bounty-house.

It will therefore be no surprise that I feel some defensive need growing in my breast, a need to defend the honor of the Militia and thereby elevate my own station and assuage some small guilt for deeds within my own wretched experience which I must yet reveal. Therefore, I say, it behooves me to speak somewhat of the honourableness and antiquity of those who take up arms against the vile things, thereby protecting all mankind. There was no small wonder in me when I learned of so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed black zomby blood; I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though perhaps subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity. Let us to it.

Chapter I: Perseus

The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first zomby hunter of record;[1] and to the eternal honour of our calling, be it said that the first zomby attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and the zombies then few and far between, and not much menace, or so it is told; they were not then the slavering, ravening horde they have become.

[1]There are hints and allegations in obscure and arcane reference tomes regarding prehistoric incidents involving zombies, but none of these could be positively verified by my researches.

Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the edge of the sea, and as one monstrous Zomby Ante Omnes was about to feast on her brains,—indeed to swallow her entire—Perseus, the prince of zomby hunters, intrepidly advancing, with his gods-given mace did stave in the monster’s head, and thereby delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best zomby hunters of the present day; inasmuch as this Zomby Ante Omnes was slain at the very first stroke of the mace. And let none doubt this story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages a vast skeleton, which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster Perseus slew.

Chapter II. Hercules

Concerning Hercules—grandson of Perseus—his admittance to our ranks is certain, for that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds did, for his second labor, do battle with the Lernaen hydra, mayhap the first created zomby, raised by Hera for the sole purpose of delivering the doom of Hercules; a doom he deftly avoided.

There at the spring of Amymone did Hercules fire flaming brands to roust the Hydra from its chthonic lair, then with sharpened scythe and storied club—both stupendous zomby weapons, to be sure, but the scythe being devilish difficult to master—Hercules battled the many-headed Hydra. Knowing its final head to be immortal—and is not the zomby in possession of some small immortality?—Hercules did sever that head with Athena’s gifted golden sword and buried that head, still slavering, under a prodigious boulder along the sacred path to Lerna and Elaius. Some have said this hydra head may be the true source of the modern zomby, and profess that once unentombed, the head did subsequently spread all latter-day zomby plagues across the wide, weird world. I know naught of this, but that Hercules may be deemed one of the greatest of zomby hunters is beyond dispute. I claim him for one of our clan.

Chapter III. Elija Black

Then there is the modern Hercules, far-seeing augur in the Mexican-American-Zomby wars, Elija Black; Lakota warrior-prophet of much renown, and with whom Ishmael is intimately united as a blood brother, for we fought back to back against the great horde in the now-famous victory of that war, that battle at the fording of the Rappahannock River in the dark Virginian woods of Warrenton; there it was that Elija and I became as brothers when corpses lay in sullen heaps all around us ere the trembling end of that long day and longer night. He it was who envisioned this voyage and bid me take it, once my other sordid duties had been settled.

Chapter IV. Vishnoo

It should be known that not only heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the zomby hunter, for is not his mace named Kaumodaki, that monarch of zomby weapons–gripped by one of his four arms?; said mace being a symbol of Vishnoo’s power to destroy the demoniac; and in another arm does not Vishnoo wield the potent sharp-spinning Sudarshana, so alike to the Militia’s sharp lance (and the whaler’s) as to be the same weapon?

And in what might be no small coincidence, when Brahma, or the God of Gods, the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo—the hunter of zombies both physical and mental—to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the Creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo not only a hunter of zombies, but a whaleman, too? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?

Perseus, Hercules, Elija Black and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you! What club but the zomby hunter’s can head off like that? In truth, perhaps the only club that can compare is that club that now surrounds me: that of the sperm whale fishermen.

Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my Zombological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draft—nay, but the draft of a draft. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

Chapter

The Shark Massacre

When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious and noisy one, not soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well.

But sometimes, especially upon The Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcass, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one hugely rotten zomby eye-socket, and those sharks the maggots in it.

Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and I came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, we darted our long whaling-spades, and thereby kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks,[1] by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part, as the zomby. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, we marksmen could not always hit our mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe.

[1]The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.

A similar implement I have seen used to great advantage against a zomby: its pole is foreshortened to a more manageable four to six feet, and in addition to the large blade of the whaling spade, it has a smaller blade affixed to the other end of the haft, called a “convenience spade” by him who wielded it, one Quay Chang, who, with incredible grace, used this cutting-spade-like weapon as though dancing. For now, Quay Chang must wait in the wings.

The sharks viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Ah, ye self-devouring sharks how alike ye are to both time and man’s sharkish mind!

So, with spade in hand I smote sharks for hour upon hour, the sweat in freshets down my chest and slithering rivulets down my back and ere long a familiar blackness overtook me, though not so black as before, and I welcomed it as one would a former lover and sank into its velvet envelopments. My shipmates stood somewhat in awe of me after that prodigious performance, and, upon seeing me uncommon good with the spade in this manner,[1] they bade Bulkington tell them more of my storied deeds ashore.

[1]Though I had studied but a short time with Quay Chang, learning less than a teenth of a teenth of the shadow of his knowledge, yet still was I elevated far above the common in the use of a cutting spade; such was Quay Chang’s prodigious skill.

At the conclusion of his story telling, Bulkington approached me to apologize for telling only of the tales he had since heard from others, and not telling of what he termed that event, saying that though it was in truth the only time he had seen me in battle with his own eyes, yet he could not bring himself to speak of it, for what he said were obvious reasons. This left me puzzled and long did I ponder the import of what his words implied. Some months later, the full story returned to me, and at the proper time, it shall be related. Though I knew not what he meant then, yet I understood his sentiment and did not press him further.

Even so, I marveled and only half-believed the tales he had told, for though I lived them, if true, they were new to me; such was the black blankness surrounding me then. All such stories aside, slaughtering the zomby-like sharks gave me some small relief from the rage that had been building in the empty cavity of my chest, despite my hopes that this whaling voyage would banish such passions. Any wiser man could have told me they would not; in point of fact I had the strange presentiment then that, far from fleeing zomby influence, I somehow delved yet deeper, and would somehow go yet further than I had done before; and this filling me with no small sense of dread.

Nor was this all regarding the sharks. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed, and here again can be seen the shark’s similarity to the zomby. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. Once fully dead, not even a zomby is so dangerous as the mouth a dead shark (but for the small matter of his contagion, of course, that being a silent, insidious thing in its beginning, if not its end).

“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down, spattering drops of crimson to the deck; “Wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made him shark must be one damn madman.”

Chapter

From
Whale to Oil

Stubb’s whale was killed Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath-breaking are all whalemen. The lovely ivory Pequod was turned abattoir; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.

In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles comprised a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached.

And now suspended in rope-rigged stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. A broad, semicircular line is then cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber.

As the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.

One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon often among the Militia, called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance, the harpooneer dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows.

This accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction.

I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learnéd naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion. The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.

Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature’s skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale’s body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, some of them circular, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connection. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.

This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect, and some of them circular, as the toothy suckers of the giant squid. It seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with the Kraken; reasoning thus, I hereby dub them Kracken Tracks.

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo babe in summer.

It does seem to me that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons, a temperature of thine own. But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!

“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!” The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre. None mark the rotten zomby torso—also ignored by the host of sharks—sinking in the lee of the whale’s vast, obscuring bulk.

Though changed in hue, the whale carcase has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk, save of course, its head, the removal of which is a process to be described in coming chapters. The corpse is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale.

The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce as zombies upon a defenseless babe whose mother lies rent and twitching. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free; free only is the zomby, that stinking thing, it is alone at a feast of one, for none will sup on him, and even rot, that devourer of all, I say, even rot has no taste for annihilated zomby flesh for a goodly length of time.

Fire is the thing for the undead, aye, the hot and purging flame. A fire would not suffice for whales, for the sea in its power denies all fire. No, the whale must be supped upon, for in this wide world we are all in turn both diners and dinner, whale and man alike.

Nor is this the end of yon whale. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log—Shoals, Rocks, and Breakers hereabouts; Beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!

Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world. Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Hawes who believe in them.

Ahab's Log: Chapter

Infandous Deeds

Ahab’s Log: October 31, 1851

Miserable Ahab! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from thy God; prowling among the oceans like a vile burglar hastening to cross some ultimate gulf. So disordered, self-condemning is thy look, that were a policemen present, on the mere evidence of thy countenance wouldst thou be arrested and hung. To dangle from the yardarm may yet be thy fate!

Fedallah hast determined that the time is nigh and as I scratch out these words, he dost prepare arcane powders and secret liniments for this nefarious thing we needs must do. Ahab, thou craven, since taking leave of Nantucket hast thou known this task to be in the offing. Did not Fedallah tell thee of it ashore, and at thy very home? Did ye not drink then, aye, and drink to splinter thy own murderous whalebone leg? So drink now, thou craven, drink thy unmitigated dark rum; down thy laudanum draught and thereby screw up thy courage. Think not, old man, to emulate that dumb son of Priam and shirk thy duty to all humanity. Think on that, Ahab; aye, think on it well as thou swillest thy burning, bitter courage.

Fedallah may have the right of it, curse his blasted soul; there will not soon—mayhap never again—be a more be reliable time whereby the task that needs doing will be shielded midst the sound and fury of cutting-in yon parmacetti with its thunder of rattling tackle, and such shouted singing as can now be heard on deck. The failing zomby we have brought from Nantucket hisses weakly, writhing in its bonds as Fedallah prepares for its final harvest. There is yet some pulsating fungus to be mined from out this creature’s skull, though Fedallah hast deemed its usefulness to be at an end. Soon—long before another whale may be taken to provide such shielding tumult as is needed—there will be naught left to harvest. Most of the yeasty mushroom protrusion from out its brain hast long since been ground down to powder and found its way to Fedallah’s foul potion.

He hast made himself abundantly clear that were he or I to go without his bitter brew, then that dire fever wouldst rise up from out the spine and strangle what little humanity may yet remain to us, thereby ejecting both from this precarious balance we do maintain, teeteringly so, in Ahab’s case. Aye, and as if in divine conjunction, the ship now heels creakingly over nigh its bulwarks and springs back as the first blanket piece is jerked free.

The ship heels back to an even keel; the not-long-to-be-man moans in his laudanum slumber, lying there next to the festering undead corpse. Nay, he not a man, Ahab, for his fate was sealed long since, ere he had his way with those young girls—thy own niece among them!—whom he did murder and then partake of their flesh. Such Militia call a Shammy, or a Sham, I know not which, nor does it matter overmuch. This thing will soon have its vision fulfilled, and become that which it emulates. Think on that old man, and feel thy chill misgivings turn to heat, firing thy purpose!

How couldst Fedallah live so many centuries in this manner? He hast performed this grim procedure scores upon scores of times—nay, ten-score scores of times! Lookest thou there: Fedallah goes about his tasks with calm unconcern, blast him! and were he to whistle, though not surprising me, I would fain strike him out of spite alone! Fedallah deems it crucial I assist him, for he hast need of other hands and mine the only trusted hands about, and he also sayest Ahab will have need to know the trick of it.

By Moby Dick’s bald ballocks, Ahab!; screw up thy courage; aye, swillest more of it; thy laudanum draught shall begin to work its magic soon. That man moaning there, captive this long time; rememberest what he hast the guilt of! Mind an eye to thine own guilt, too, and the way in which this vile sinner’s sacrifice will assuage thy debt to those yet living. Rememberest that he is a zomby in truth though he is not yet undead. Recall those heinous deeds! Thine own niece, Ahab!

Once the fever and the Quickening hast done its preservational work, then must we sever that new-created thing at the torso, thereby disabling it, as was done to the one there expiring ere sailing upon this voyage. That heinous act Fedallah then did himself, deeming Ahab unready for the gruesome task. In this Ahab concurs, for had he included me then in that sacrificial ritual, Ahab wouldst have given entirely in to raving. Indeed, even now canst thou feel its claws scrabbling at thy mind.

Once that vile human is transformed into a yet more vile thing and then transfixed, its foul sprouting head will provide the needed yeast for Fedallah’s potion, the evil brew that keepest Ahab from the spore that grows within, in the damp dark mushroomy hollows of thy body, where vile mycelium even now slithers slowly up thy spine to pound at the gateways of thy brain. Rememberest that, Ahab. Hold that uppermost in thy mind as ye swillest thy rum and the laudanum begins its numbing work.

The thumps of sharks against the hull make thee jump and engender a nervousness thou hast not felt since thou wore short pants as ship’s boy, lifetimes ago. Man thy inner capstan, Ahab, to thy marlingspike! and prepare to heave, for Fedallah hast this very moment gazed thy way and dost motion thee to attend him.

Oh! infandous deed! ‘Tis done. Fedalldah did harvest the last bit of coruscating fungus from ever-widening hole in the zomby’s skull. Supporting the veracity of Fedallah’s grim expertise, that creature did indeed expire and cease to cling to whatever animation it possessed when Fedallah scooped the last cheesy spoonful from out the thing’s skull. A true corpse now, the stinking thing was dumped to drift with the stripped, shark-battered bulk of the whale, both soon sinking, the zomby’s poison flesh—untasted by sharks—falling next to that vast skeletonized corpse of the Leviathan, both to drift down for hours to some benthic depth, dancing there in the abyss.

Fedallah didst produce his vial of black-tar laudanum then, and in short order the rapacious criminal wast fully unconscious, breathing his last breaths as human, and Ahab, after an additional draught for himself, was ready for his task. Fedallah pulled from out some secret pocket another, smaller vial, containing what he named spores, a sort of fungal seed, saying it was dearly bought and worth the coffers of all kings, the living, the dead, and those yet to come. With wry glance Fedallah then chastised Ahab for his lingering belief that a cruelty would be done to the drugged felon, one more cruel than those he had perpetrated against his many nubile victims.

Ere long the man burned with fever; his body shuddered, vibrating against the deck; aloft all is yet commotion and busy-ness; none above hear aught of anything below, and such is the way of the world; for ever is heaven deaf to the carking cares of earthbound souls! And both are blind and deaf to those below and further beneath.

Soon the thing’s eyes opened in milky stare and, already restrained, the thing attempted to lunge upwards, Fedallah standing with sharpened boarding sword above it, prepared to swing, cautioning ye to look away lest the spatter further infect thee. Fedallah landed three deft and nearly delicate cuts and then in one mighty chop sliced through the monster’s abdomen, and through the spine, one vertebra above the hips. The tarpaulin placed under the body to gather the gore was then removed, and dumped surreptitiously overboard. Fedallah now brandishes the carpenter’s borrowed augur drill, sets its point against the groaning thing’s skull, and begins to crank its handle.

Enough! Ahab must have air. Air!

Chapter

Monkey Rope

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little, to such time as the whale was yet moored alongside the Pequod, in an effort to bring some small levity to the darkness recently revealed.

It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen.

Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round the waist and tightly tied at the back.

It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then honour demanded that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. An elongated Siamese ligature united us; Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge me into disaster and death. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, you, one way or other, have this Siamese connection with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks by dint of his unscrupulousness, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die; if when fighting a zomby with good intent you taste bitter salt as some drop of gore lands on your tongue, you become undead. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.[1]

[1]The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.

I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow from the carcase—the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.

And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.

Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark—he was provided with still another protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a tail. But poor Queequeg, straining and gasping there with that great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.

Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea—what matters it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.

But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted warrior at last climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory glance hands him—what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water!

“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. “Yes, this must be ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astonished steward slowly saying, “Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-Boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is ginger? Sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here. There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,” he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. “Will you look at that kannakin, sir; smell of it, if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added, “The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?”

“I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”

“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug a harpooneer; none of your apothecary’s medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?”

“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this ginger-jub—so she called it.”

“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain’s orders—grog for the harpooneer on a whale.”

“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but—“

“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort; and this fellow’s a weasel. What were you about saying, sir?”

“Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.”

When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that was freely given to the waves.

Chapter

Beheadings

It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded, though this was vaguely implied when speaking earlier of Ahab’s peculiar greedy requisition of the whale’s brains. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason, for it more difficult by far than separating that same anatomical feature from a zomby, whose neck, in addition to being rather obvious, is also of slight girth in comparison.

Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that with the whale the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skillfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb’s boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?

The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element, for the sperm whale’s head embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers’ scales.

And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith.

When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.

Up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin, somewhat pale and shaky it seemed to me; Bulkington said he smelled strongly of rum but I did not smell it; we were at our masthead watch, high aloft. Taking a few lumbering turns on the quarter-deck, then with deliberate care, as a drunk does, getting into the main-chains, Ahab took Stubb’s long spade—still remaining there after the whale’s Decapitation—and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with sea mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered man when tossed by desperate men from the whaleship deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!” He staggered and seemed about to continue.

“Sail ho!” cried Bulkington from the main-mast-head.

“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man.—Where away?”

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

“Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”

Chapter

The Jeroboam

Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock. By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would be made.

Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable distances and with no small facility.

The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s setting her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod’s lee, and though her decks appeared a bit chaotic even from a distance, yet she lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged by Starbuck’s order to accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat’s stern in token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though himself and boat’s crew remained untainted, or so it seemed, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the Pequod, the crew of which, upon this news, grew agitated and cast glances across the rippling sea, none now so sure of the incorruptibleness of the sea bespoke earlier.

Preserving an interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam’s boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the Pequod as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some way ahead; but would be soon skillfully brought to her proper bearings again. Subject to this, and other interruptions of the like now and then, a conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not without still another interruption of a very different sort.

Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat was a man of a singular appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes, and upon seeing the man, a look of hooded recognition passed swiftly over Fedallah’s darkened countenance.

So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed—“That’s he! that’s he!—the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho’s company told us of!” Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam during a gam with the Town-Ho, and a certain man among the Jeroboam’s crew. According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in question had gained a wondrous ascendency over almost everybody in the Jeroboam. His story was this:

He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several times descended from heaven by way of a trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with zombergris—a magical substance previously mentioned—the ingestion of which will, he avowed, keep one untouched by the zomby infestation. A strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam’s whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship’s getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet.

He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he declared these things;—the dark, daring play of his sleepless, unblinking imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium; all these united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness even though in truth he was that which is most profane. Moreover, the crew of the Jeroboam were afraid of Gabriel.

The incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that the Captain’s intention was to land Gabriel in the first convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials—devoting the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew, that at last in a body, they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. The captain was therefore forced to relinquish his plan.

The consequence of all this was that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. But it is time to return to the Pequod.

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

But now Gabriel started to his feet.

“Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Think on the unholy gnawing of flesh! Beware the horrible plague!”

“Gabriel! Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either—” But that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech.

“Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back.

“Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail! Beware the fungal contamination of the maw!”

“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—” But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which, by one of those occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to warrant.

When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.

It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Zomby God incarnated. But when, some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel’s denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity.

Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat’s bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman’s head; but the mate for ever sank.

It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener the boat’s bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is discernible; the man being stark dead.

The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek—“The vial! the vial!” Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.

Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him that Mayhew could not forbear inquiring whether Ahab intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which Ahab answered—“Aye.”

Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger—“Think, think of the blasphemer—dead, and down there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”

Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I have just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.”

Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two or three years or more.

Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.

Ahab attempted to decipher the mottled letter, muttering, “Mr. Har—yes, Mr. Harry—(a woman’s pinny hand,—the man’s wife, I’ll wager)—Aye—Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;—why it’s Macey, and he’s dead!”

“Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but let me have it.”

“Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou art soon going that way.”

“Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive it.” Taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted a little towards the ship’s stern; so that, as if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s eager hand. He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab’s feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.

After this interlude, as the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.

Chapter

On the Heads of Whales

It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s prodigious bloodied head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.

Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.

Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats, Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel’s side. But having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete circuit.

Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale’s body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that poured from the smitten rock.

At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse.

While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between them.

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

“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s bow, “did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale’s on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards capsize?”

“Why not?

“I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes think he’ll charm the ship to no good at last. I don’t half like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake’s head, Stubb?”

“Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down there, Flask”—pointing into the sea with a peculiar shoving motion of both hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been stowed away on board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The reason why you don’t see his tail is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of it, he’s always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots.”

“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”

“No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the rigging.”

“What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”

“Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”

“Bargain?—about what?”

“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he’ll surrender Moby Dick.”

“Tell me, Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is now on board the Pequod?”

“Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?”

“How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”

“Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well, that’s the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold, and string ‘em along in a row with that mast, for zeroes, do you see; well, that wouldn’t begin to be Fedallah’s age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn’t show hoops enough to make zeroes enough.”

“But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if he’s so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he’s going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?

“Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”

“But he’d crawl back.”

“Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”

“Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes, and drown you—what then?”

“I should like to see him try it; I’d give him such a pair of black eyes that he wouldn’t dare to show his face in the admiral’s cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the orlop[1] there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks, where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask; so you suppose I’m afraid of the devil?

[1]orlop: the lowest deck in a ship having four or more decks.

“Do you suppose Fedallah wants to harm Captain Ahab?”

“Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I’m going now to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going on, I’ll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say—Look here, Beelzebub, don’t you do it!; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll make a grab into his pantaloons for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving that his tail will come short off at the stump—do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs.”

“And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?”

“Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?”

“Now, do you mean what you’ve been saying all along, Stubb?”

“Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.”

The boats were here hailed to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him.

“Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this right whale’s head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti’s.”

In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of both whales had been dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.

Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.

But come out now, and look at the portentous lower jaw of the sperm whale, which seems like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship’s jib-boom.

In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised artist—is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.

With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor; and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild woodlands. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion with silver, gold, or lead. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses.[1]

[1]Upon pondering gold-filled teeth, a memory startled me. Vander—former member of my grim but merry band of Militia—was a queer, acquisitive sort; he would harvest the gold and silver-filled teeth from zombies he despatched, and would keep said teeth in a tough leathern pouch where they rattled like Death’s own dice. Aristotle could well have held Vander up as near-pure exemplar of hamartia, as you shall soon learn.

Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale’s head. As you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles the apertures in its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass—this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the Southern fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird’s nest in its crotch.

Look at that hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.

Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth: the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.

Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death, but in a way much different than the zomby’s mindless indifference. But mark the other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years; but the zomby will ever and anon be a nihlist and, unlike those other two, it will do all in its power to convert you to its Philosophy.

Again, let us lay eyes on the sperm whale’s head. Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, slavering, with arms uplifted, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes? This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.

Let us consider the whale’s spout-hole. As his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal—is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!

Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have you remark its front aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded history.

You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he has—his spout hole—is on the top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale’s head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy.

In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any who has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.

Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide. That tough buffer bravely and uninjured takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is—by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect. And what marvel that, deep within its citadel, that convoluted organ of volition sits as a king in his impregnable castle. What horror if the zomby did possess such an unassailable brain! Such a creature would be well-nigh impossible to destroy.

When I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eyebrow.

Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very long in following.

Chapter

Tashtego's Spermy Shroud

Now comes the Bailing of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated upon. Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,[1] whereof the lower is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance.

[1]Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides.

The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun.

Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water.

A large whale’s case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can.

I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale’s case.

It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since—as has been elsewhere set forth—the head embraces one third of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted perpendicular against a ship’s side.

As in decapitating the whale, the operator’s instrument is brought close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.

Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and—in this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale’s great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.

Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air till dexterously he lands on the grisly summit of the head.

There—still high elevated above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries—he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid’s pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.

Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way; several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! poor Tashtego—like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!

“Man overboard!” cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first came to his senses. “Swing the bucket this way!” and putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which he had sunk.

On the summit of the head at this instant, Daggoo was clearing the whip—which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles—a sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent motions of the head.

“Come down, come down!” yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he would still remain suspended; Daggoo having cleared the foul line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.

“In heaven’s name, man,” cried Stubb, “are you ramming home a cartridge there?—Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head? Avast, will ye!”

“Stand clear of the tackle!” cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.

Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging—now over the sailors’ heads, and now over the water—Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword in his hand was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.

“Ha! ha!” cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave, but all felt jubilation instead of dread.

“Both! both!—it is both!”—cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.

Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;—he had thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way—head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected.

And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.

I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header’s will be sure to seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or heard of some one’s falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason than the Indian’s, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale’s well.

But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well—a double welded, hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the present instance materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery, so it was.

Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, enshrouded and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?

Chapter

Ishmael Dreams

Your eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is sound, your whole body is sound, your whole body is full of light; but when it is not sound, your body is full of darkness.
—Luke 11:34

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as my Militia on the prairie hunted up our own supper of game.

Stumbling in exhaustion, I descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle, gripping tightly a bottle full and slippery with spermaceti oil, and a dripping wick; my watch was over and I required sleep. If you are unfamiliar with life aboard a whaleship, upon descending into the forecastle, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There we lay in our triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon our hooded eyes.

In merchant vessels, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes of his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night, the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.

Lighting my lamp, I lay staring up at the whorls in the wood of the berth above me; and, unable to sleep for a time, watched the flickering play of light and shadow there as the lamps swayed from the ship’s movement. The shadows jumped and danced, as if the lamps were the musicians of some Fey orchestra, the light and darkness the dance partners swaying to their eldritch melody; the clatter from above becoming a comforting percussive accompaniment. Thus lulled, I soon fell into sleep and was sucked down to dreaming.

Again was I there on deck, belted into the monkey rope, feet planted firmly, sharks boiling about the carcase of the dead whale below, their ravenous gnashing terrible to behold. The monkey rope jerked me near off my feet into that threshing many-toothed maw and, glancing down, I saw that it was not Queequeg perched there on the whale but Ahab!

Ahab had become horrible to behold, for he was unclothed and nakedly capered there on that slick back, lightning-scarred from crown to sole, his whalebone leg making horrible meaty chunking sound as he drove it savagely into the whale’s back. A gaping bloodless gash lay livid and purple, high on his thigh. Where his navel should have been, the gold doubloon glinted, hinting at some portent I was too shocked to grasp, for Ahab had his hand on the monkey rope and made to jerk me off the ship into the sharky water! I stood struck dumb, stunned; was yanked two steps forward even as my fingers frantically scrabbled at the belt.  The knot was at the back, and in that way of dreams, I knew it had been tightly tied by Pip, who was ever clever at that sailor’s art.

Closer and closer did Ahab yank me with his prodigious strength till I felt the taffrail strike my chest, hard enough to take my breath. I turned to shout, “Help me! Queequeg! For God’s sake!” but upon looking over my shoulder, I saw all the ship’s company lumbering there, stumbling toward me with arms graspingly upraised; they moaned and hissed for my blood, and at their front was my dear friend, Queequeg, his eyes horridly white and unblinking, his swirling facial tattoos horribly twisted by the fearsome snarl on his face. Panic clawed its way up from my bowels to my brain.

As I was desperately grabbing for the empty sheath of Little Blackie, with a final yank did Ahab pull me from the ship, even as he jumped from the carcase of the whale down through the shark-frothed waters into the deep. Then the weightlessness of falling through air; then the hard softness of striking the cold sea, and then again weightless was I pulled down into frigid blackness, my fingers still ineffectually scrabbling at the belt strapping me to raving Ahab; the lamp-lit Pequod receding in a circle of light above, the pressure building and building and building as I sank. Then, there in the round diminishing circle of light from above, a figure swam down towards me. Ah!, thought I, Queequeg has somehow thrown off the plague and comes to save me! But as the figure swam swiftly down, I saw not Queequeg, but his little god, Yojo, stroking towards me, his wooden face split in black-toothed grin. With a sidelong glance, Yojo swam past me to deeper darkness, toward Ahab, where he did wrench the gold doubloon from Ahab’s navel, then, swimming upwards to me, still blackly grinning, he began to painfully screw the doubloon into my own navel.

I woke screaming.

Chapter

Pitchpoling

To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed with grease; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat, and took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft’s bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.

Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy. Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What then remained?

Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a small rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to the hand after darting.

But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful, on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling comes into play.

Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before his waistband’s middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He reminds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.

“That drove the spigot out of him!” cried Stubb. “ ’Tis July’s immortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I’d have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we’d drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the living stuff.”

Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated, the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die.[1]

[1]Similar technique was used by my Militia band when plagued by ennui of simpler zomby slaughter. There must be not too many zombies for this activity to be amusing; it requires at least two Militia participants, but many more often join in. One or more play the role of bait, standing at one end of an open space, downwind to entice the zombies thither. The companions of the bait are hid upwind, concealed from zomby olfactories.

The bait simply runs about, yelling and screaming (though not too close to the edges of the open space, for zombies appear anywhere); when the zombies raise up their arms like stupefied marionettes lurching to the bait, then do the pitchpolers come from their blind and strive to launch spears, lances, or other such skewering implements—all secured with thin rope for easy retrieval as in the whaling practice.

It is exceeding difficult to kill a zomby thus, for unless he is speared directly through the skull or in some way beheaded, he will suffer no injury lest it be to a leg, in which case he will become a Byron, that is, somewhat drogued,——a technique soon to be elucidated. Once the fun has been had, or upon the appearance of more of the undead, the game is ended when all players converge on the remaining zombies and relieve them for ever of their hungers.

Chapter

Whale Tails

Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail. Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.

The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers are long and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry.

But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it. Had I such a tail at my command, I would have it dash the mushroom life from a dozen zomby skulls with one fell blow!

Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charm would be gone.

Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no Fairy’s arm can transcend it.

Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.[1]

[1]Likewise are there five distinct motions to the zomby: First: Unmoving quiescence when cold. Second: Shambling when traveling without nearby victims. Third: investigating a noise or smell, moving faster. Fourth: Arms upraised and moving quickly when victims are sensed close by. Fifth: Most horrendous and frightful of all, when close upon its victim, the zomby becomes a slavering, gnashing, ravening, flailing, all-consuming, demoniac monster that makes the bravest heart quake in bowel-voiding terror.

First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.

Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the whale boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child’s play. Some one strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped.

Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the elephant’s trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor’s whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes’ elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. A pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart.

Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapour from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was the smoke from the touch-hole.

Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime breach—somewhere else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature.

Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers.

The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable are these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.

Chapter

The
Grand Armada

Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits of Sunda to board ships bound for the China seas, fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.

With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits of Sunda; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of Japan—where Ahab lost his leg—in time for the great whaling season there. By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.

Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground roundabout was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake, a practice that in no small way curtailed my own masthead reveries. But though the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of singular magnificence saluted us.

But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months together without being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.[1]

[1]And so too, as the campaign against the zomby increases its ferocity, does the zomby begin to so group itself in greater and greater numbers, as dramatically seen in the coldest winter months when they huddle together in festering clots for warmth. Should this behavior continue, it may well be that such huge hosts will become nigh unstoppable.

Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually rising and falling away to leeward.

Seen from the Pequod’s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the sea, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.

As marching armies accelerate their march when approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now hurry forward through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle and swimming on in one solid but still crescentic centre.

Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly directing attention to something in our wake.

Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear. It seemed formed of detached white vapours, rising and falling something like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying, “Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the sails;—Malay pirates, and after us!”

As if too long lurking behind the headlands till the Pequod should fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit to make up for their over-cautious delay. How very kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit,—mere riding-whips and rowels to her. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance and no small redemption in man’s eye, if not in God’s ledger; and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses;—when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place, for the root cause of these furrows were locked in the bony darkness of his skull.

But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,—though as yet a mile in their rear,—than they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.

Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and after several hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase, when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus’ elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic.[1]

[1]In its tendency to become panic-stricken, or gallied, does the sperm whale differ substantially from the zomby, for a zomby cannot be gallied, nor perturbed in any manner, and though he is one miniscule fraction of the bulk of even the smallest sperm whale and orders of magnitude less strong, with this one trait—his inability to be gallied—does the zomby become more dangerous than even the most enraged forty-barrel bull.

This was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman.

Witness, too, how human beings, when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit, at the slightest alarm of a zomby among them, will rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes’ time, Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under such circumstances is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.

Blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed.

Not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to make long ones.

Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business.

“Out of the way, Commodore!” cried one to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant threatened to swamp us.

“Hard down with your tail, there!” cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.

As we went, we struck darts in three more whales as we passed them. But how is this, Ishmael? Are your eyes larger than your stomach to thus dart whales which may never be retrieved? Hear now of the drogue.

All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called drogues. Two thick squares of wood of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each other’s grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly among gallied whales that this drogue is used. For then, more whales are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time.[1]

[1]This practice is similar to that used ashore when faced with a large number of zombies, however no drouging device is necessary. A crippling blow, such as the severing of a hamstring, Achilles tendon, or similarly hobbling blows. Once the zomby is disabled, a Militia member can easily despatch the zomby at leisure and with less risk to life, limb, and soul. Vander it was who, again drawing on his small whaling experience, called this technique “drouging the zomby.”

But sperm whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure; and thus it also is with the zomby. Hence it is, that at times like these the drogue comes into requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of them. The first and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drogue. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the boat’s bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for the time.

It had been next to impossible to dart these drogued-harpoons were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly diminished; moreover, as we went still further and further from the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out and the towing whale sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.

Still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs.

Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.

These smaller whales—now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake—evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. Suspended in those watery vaults floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.

“Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him fast!—Who line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one little!”

“What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck.

“Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down.

As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.[1]

[1]The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. On absolutely no occasion however, should one treat similarly with that turbid, brackish milk from the dugs of a zomby that Quickened while nursing, nor eat that rancid milk with any type of fruit.

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy, though it now be so deeply buried as to seem but a phantom; still and all, there it lies, a pale shadowy memory of joy.

Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drouging the whales on the frontier of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the enraged drogued whales now and then blindly darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic tail-tendon, much as the zombie is drouged as previously mentioned. It is done by darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles, sowing destruction like Vander’s berserker rage at the battle of the Vernal Field, carrying his dismay wherever he went, as you shall learn.

But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.

This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters.

Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the long steering oar at the stern.

“Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—“grip your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off, you Queequeg—the whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand up—stand up, and stay so! Spring, men—pull, men; never mind their backs—scrape them!—scrape away!”

The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.

Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drogued whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.

The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the drogued whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.

Chapter

Fast & Loose

Allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the previous chapter necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge. It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For example,—after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases.

Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with Other People’s Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne’s farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who
can soonest catch it.

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.

Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other
recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to do.

My first acquaintance with the waif pole and the notion of this sort of ownership came not aboard ship, but among my Militia band, in the person of a man we called Vander. To the astute reader, this will come as no large surprise for, as previously expounded upon, there are myriad connections between the killing of whales and the killing of zombies. Vander, in addition to introducing me to the practice of waif-poling one’s kills and the definition of a fast-zomby and a loose-zomby; he was also, by unhappy chance, the first man I had to put down while he was yet human; before the slight bite he took threatened to Quicken him into a more malignant menace.

Vander was one of those men called a Gimmie among the Militia, for ever and anon was he concerned with amassing both finery and valuables from zombies he killed, and alas, it would be his hamartia. He was a queer, prideful man who, upon downing a zomby, would shout, “Fast zomby!” then jabbing into the corpse his silly little whittled waiflet pole with its bit of bright blue ribbon. For Vander had been a-whaling, and though he had forsaken the fishery after one short voyage—in his words, it was “too much toil and danger for too little coin, and drowning’s no way to die”—yet the practices of that fishery were made indelible on his spirit and so became a primary source of his prideful airs. We did not ask him whether an axe blow to the head was a better means of losing one’s life than drowning; it seemed ill-advised at the time, though part of me yet wonders. Had I been in his position, I would favor the crushing weightless embrace of the deepest sea over an axe to the head.

Vander—we also called him Corn-boy and Commodore; I do not remember his Christian name—was so called after Cornelius Vanderbilt, billionaire baron of the railroads who had amassed a prodigious fortune off the backbreaking labor of others—whom he no doubt deemed loose-fish, free for the taking. Vanderbilt built his empire off the backs of blacks and whites and Chinamen alike, all of whom shared little but the trait of poverty and need; and ever has it been that not the color of the skin, but a thin wallet and shared backbreaking labor makes men brothers more reliably than will ties of blood.

Vander’s singular whaling voyage had shaped him in many ways; his favored weapon was a whaler’s long-bladed boarding sword with a wicked edge he was for ever honing, the rough scrape of steel on whetstone often heard in camp when Vander was on watch. That hissing grinding scraping sound will forever evoke feelings of both security and danger in my breast, for Vander was not alone in his frequent application of the whetstone.

It was on his short whaling voyage that Vander discovered waif pole usage, and the rules governing fast fish and loose fish. When Vander joined our small band, already had he adopted the practice of claiming zombies using similar protocols to those used in the fishery (he was the only one who ever did so to my knowledge). Vander went so far as to whittle sharpened sticks with a bit of blue ribbon on them, calling them waiflet poles which he would stick in his kills if there was time, and he often took the time, though it risked no small danger to himself and his fellows.

Around a grateful farmer’s hearth one night, Vander sat whittling his waiflet poles, now and again reaching into a ragged pile of blue cloth pilfered from the clothes of killed zombies, and attaching the cloth to a finished sharpened stick, then jammed it into his quiver to be ready for the coming day. Winnifred queried him why he spent his leisure time on such frippery.

“It amuses me,” Vander said. “Calling such a slow lumbering thing, once dead, a fast zomby is rather funny, I should say. And the jaunty blue ribbon I stick in him to claim him as my own, funnier still. There is nothing funny about a loose zomby, however,” he said laughing alone at his lame jest. “And it should be known,” he continued with that grandiloquence we had all come to somewhat loathe, “that since ancient times, the executioner, upon executing his duty—har har—is thereby the new owner of the property so recently quit by the dead.”

“Taint dead,” growled Bat, the surliest of our company. “Cain’t kill what’s already dead.” It was eight more words than he usually spoke, for stout Bartholomew Higgins (his Christian name) had in him a rage and a kindness both, and that kindness and rage combined forbade him to speak overmuch, or so it seemed; tightly coiled he was, as though his inner life were like the innards of an overwound patent chronometer, that is to say, wound so tightly that it may at any moment explode outwards in a thousand sharp and deadly shards or, failing that, break and lie unmoving and worthless.

In battle though, Bat directed that spring-wound inner tension against zombies, and they went down like harvested wheat before the scythe of his wrath. Bat never spoke of what had tightened his inner spring thus, but such rage sat heavy—if not wound so tightly—in all our breasts, but it seemed somehow more savage in Bat, and closer to the surface. Its source remained ever a mystery.

Bat seemed now ready to burst, the veins did stand out in his neck so! “Zombies ain’t dead, they’s dead already,” Bat repeated, standing angrily. He stomped off to bed, muttering as he went, “Cain’t kill what’s already dead. Dead. Dead and gone. Gone.”

“Semantics do not hold my interest,” Vander said, waving his hand dismissively at Bat’s retreating broad back. “Dead is as dead does. If it moves, it lives, and if it ceases to move it is dead; what could be simpler? When a loose zomby becomes a fast zomby, which is to say a dead one, I stick him with my waiflet pole so all will know his scalp and sundries are mine and mine alone.” And though we thought his ideas somewhat silly, yet did we adopt the term loose-zomby for any zomby yet animate, in his honor. Thus the cry, “Ware the loose-zomby,” that comes to me unbidden when seeing such.

For all his faults, Vander was valiant enough, and was not a bad man to draw as partner for the day’s killing.[1] He was handy with his boarding sword and kept it sharp as could be. Though all knew his propensity for greed and the danger inherent in the sticking of his silly blue-bannered waiflet poles, he was both loyal and protective of the partner he fought with, and was known more often than not to abandon his waiflet-sticking in order to come to his fighting partner’s aid. But remember, dear reader, that ever are men remembered by that which defines them over that which they do, for though Vander was more than brave, and honest after his own fashion, yet he was a greedy man and had in equal measure both aptitude and tragedy; his folly was his affectation.

[1]I do believe Bat had the right of it in his semantical protest. Here I say “killing,” for simplicity’s sake, but how can one kill that which is without life? It is but too awkward to say otherwise, and so, “killing” must suffice. The zomby by his very existence defies even language, damn him. And there is but fine example, for how can such a creature be damned if it holds no soul? And if, God forbid, the soul is in some wise trapped within the rotting corpse, it is damned already.

He fought that fateful day with Winnifred, fierce matron of forty years and few are the fighters I have met who were fiercer or smarter. Winnifred had lost her three sons and husband to the plague, and so I had a fond spot for her in my heart. She had offered to swing the killing blow to Vander at the close of that drab day, but I demurred, for as de facto commander, the duty of despatching infected members of our troupe was mine, and had I delegated such duty to another, it would have reduced my esteem among our group. I would not shirk my duty in this, distasteful though it be. True, Vander was ever a vainglorious poltroon, yet still it is no easy thing to kill a man, however deep his flaws, for who among us is flawless? Killing such a one exacts a price. But onward, Ishmael; tell the tale.

We had been roaming in long-drawn Virginia vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over all there stole a hush, a hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lay sleeping in those solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixed with a most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole. The mood and modes of spring growth seemed to belie the business in which we were about to engage.

I was a mile to the north, paired with that wondrous Chinaman, Quay Chang, while Vander and Winnifred had been engaged with a smallish group of zombies to the north—no less than twelve—when Vander made his fatal mistake. They had been fighting in a swift and ever shifting, back-to-back stance as taught us by Quay Chang, with but a dozen feet between them. Winnifred had lopped the head from the shoulders of an especially rotten zomby, its eyehole squirming with fat maggots; its body dropped, but the head rolled behind Winnie and there slavered. Landing with eyes upright, it could see Vander chopping away at its vile kin with his boarding sword.

At the same instant, before their shifting pattern had moved on, Vander delivered a mighty blow the the zomby he faced, cleaving its skull in twain. When the zomby dropped, he bent to stick it with one of his silly waiflet poles, for it was a well-dressed zomby, and gold glinted in its broken-toothed maw. But the corpse just slain had fallen next to the decapitated, yet still-animate head of Winnifred’s zomby, which then bit Vander as he planted his pole; but only enough to break the skin; only enough for Vander to know his life was forfeit.

To his credit, Vander did not attempt to hide his small wound, and for that brave face is he redeemed in my heart for all prior foolishness. To his further credit, after receiving his grievous scratch, Vander embarked on a berserker rampage as often happens to those so bitten, and in short order he had decimated the remaining zombies (there were, in fact, ten of them remaining). During this, Vander’s tears coursed down his cheeks, and continued to do so until I stove in his skull with Blackie, for we were out of moonshine, the preferred method of suicide in the Militia.

We buried him with full honors, such as our beggarly means allowed. The quiet, calm, grassy field in which we laid him was dappled with sun, and flowers waved their bright colors in bold and bright denial of the evil in the world. Though I did not much like Vander, my disdain was not such that the taking of his life did not move me deeply, as it would any other with a soul yet in his body. I did ponder long on the wherefore of that deed, and birthed this requiem for Vander, titled: A Grave Near Petersburg, Virginia

Head-board and foot-board duly placed—
Grassed in the mound between;
Vander is the slumberer’s name—
Long may his grave be green!

Quick was his way—a flash and a blow and a pole,
Full of his fire was he—
A fire of hell—’tis burnt out now—
Green may his grave long be!

May his grave be green, though he,
Venator of iron mould;
He had a true heart—true to the Cause,
Through the blaze of his wrath lies cold.

May his grave be green—still green
While happy years shall roll;
May none come nigh to disinter
This token planted here, this waving waiflet pole.

And so saying, Winnifred stepped forward to plant one of Vander’s waiflet poles in the soft earth (for we buried our dead, and did not burn them). Then each of us did plant Vander’s remaining waiflet poles about the mounded earth, with no small thanks and no few tears. All stood in silence for a long moment, then Bat turned, muttering, and stalked off. As if his movement unhinged our own volition, all followed him, each in solemn silence as the sky darkened and a sullen rain began to fall.

Talking that evening around the fire, those cynics among us said Vander had wept for the loss of all the gold and finery he had by then collected, but I knew—as did most others despite what they said—that for all the piles of fine possessions and no small amount of gold-filled teeth rattling hollowly in the pouch he carried, it was life Vander treasured most in those final moments, aye, cherished beyond all the gold in creation. No small irony was lost on us for keeping Vander’s[1] hard-earned bounty and his boots; the leathern sack of rattling, gold-filled teeth did also fetch a pretty penny.

[1]Ere Bulkington’s self-imposed doom, he convinced me that Vander’s name was, in truth, Josiah Stegner; though he shall always be Vander to my memory. May he rest in peace.

No longer do I know whence all those once-boon companions now reside, whether in some loamy abode; whether still wielding lance and sword and spear gainst the undead host; whether ashes upon the wind; or, perhaps like me, fled upon the rolling seas where the grave be always ready dug and the zombies be few and far between. Where’er they may be; I wish to them a short life, and a jolly death!

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed after-battle calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, childhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescent doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in adulthood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, children, and adults again, and Ifs abound eternally.

Where lies the final harbor whence we unmoor no more? Down what path is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

Regardless of the path taken, while we have it in us, Life is but a fast-fish, and none but the innermost Self can lay claim to the waif-pole; but when death’s blow is dealt, then that empty temple—the body—becomes a loose-fish, and claim is laid to the corpse by all and sundry, from undertaker to the fuzz of corpsemold sticking its tiny waifpoles in the dead flesh, consuming it there in the loamy, sunless grave.

In the end, you must ask: what is the principle of religious belief in skeptic’s heart but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, dear reader, but a Fast-Fish, and a Loose-Fish, too?

Chapter

The Rosebud

A week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapoury, mid-day sea, the many noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.

“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drouged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they would keel up before long.”

Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled and hovered and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.

Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general.

The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger that Stubb vowed he recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales.

“There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship’s bows, “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; for more often than not, all the oil they will get won’t be enough to dip the Captain’s wick into; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the drouged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there.

“Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let’s make him a present of a little oil for dear charity’s sake. For what oil he’ll get from that drouged whale there, wouldn’t be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I’ll agree to get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours than he’ll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It’s worth trying. Yes, I’m for it,” and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.

By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat’s crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read “Bouton de Rose,”—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.

“A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that will do very well; but how like all creation it smells!” In order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, Stubb had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale; and so talk over it. Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled—“Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?”

“Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the chief-mate.

“Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?”

“What whale?”

“The White Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?

“Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanc ! White Whale—no.”

“Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.”

Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over the quarter-deck rail, looking somewhat fatigued and harried, impatiently awaiting his report; Stubb moulded his two hands into a trumpet and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the Frenchman.

He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag.

“What’s the matter with your nose, there?” said Stubb. “Broke it?”

“I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all!” answered the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much. “But what are you holding yours for?”

“Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain’t it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?”

“What in the devil’s name do you want here?” roared the Guernseyman, flying into a sudden passion.

“Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that’s the word! why don’t you pack those whales in ice while you’re working at ‘em? But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it’s all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn’t a quarter pint in his whole carcase.”

“I know that well enough; but, d’ye see, the Captain here won’t believe it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But come aboard, and mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t me; and so I’ll get out of this dirty scrape.”

“Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories.

Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. Stubb therefore held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter’s office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the interview.

By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them.

“What shall I say to him first?” said he.

“Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, “you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me, though I don’t pretend to be a judge.”

“He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain, “that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all Quickened from the plague caught from a blasted whale they had brought alongside.”

Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.

“What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.

“Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a baboon.”

“He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far more deadly than the blasted one; Monsieur, he conjures us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.”

Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.

“What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them.

“Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in fact, tell him I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody else.”

“He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of service to us.”

Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.

“He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the interpreter.

“Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to drink with the man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”

“He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking; but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had best lower all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for it’s so calm they won’t drift.”

By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his boat, he would do what he could to help them by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s boats were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.

Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.

And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without at all blending with it for a time.

“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”

Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab’s loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them good bye.

Chapter

Ambergris

Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learnéd. In no small part confounded somewhat by the place in which Captain Joshua Coffin found his 362 ounces of ambergris, in the anus of a female sperm whale killed of the coast of Guinea, West Africa.

Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastilles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.

Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boatloads of Pennyroyal’s Purgative Pills, and then running out of harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.

I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors’ trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing more than pieces of small squid beaks embalmed in that manner.

Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk.[1] Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.

[1]Paracelsus (Phillipus Andreaus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541), inventor of laudanum—his recipe included ambergris, opium, crushed pearls, musk, and amber—wrote that human excrement contained “all the noble essences,” and did say that, “decay is the midwife of very great things.” *

*Paracelsus did also believe a homunculus could be made from putrefied human semen and horse
manure, as he wrote in his De Natura Rerum.

I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman’s two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?

I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is that upon breaking into the hold and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old city grave-yard for the foundations of a Lying-in-Hospital, or a battlefield littered with zomby corpses, just after the first purging fire is lit, for then you have the stench of the rotting zomby coupled with the fouler stink of its burning corpse on the wind.[1] In yet another parallel between the fishery and the Militia, this stench is a source of the disdain leveled unfairly against each necessary endeavor.

[1]While the opinion that all whales smell bad is simply false, however reasonable yet uninformed that conclusion may have been, it is as true as true can be that all zombies do smell quite horrible, and the older they get, the more their flesh begins to deliquesce, the worse the smell. In one sense, so to speak, this is wonderful providence, for the noisome nature of the rotting zomby forecasts his appearance, if only one has the good fortune to be upwind of him.

I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless.

Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town to do honour to Alexander the Great?

The truth is, living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised by any smell that a normal man may have which, it must be granted, can be rather unpleasant all on its own. Look to thine own stink, says Ishmael, and cast not thy nose skyward in disdain at another’s, most especially if only imagined, for all send up a stink of one sort or another, is it not so? Would that all such stinks had as their byproduct a thing so fine as ambergris!

Ahab’s Log: Chapter

Added Ballast

Ahab’s Log: November 7, 1851

Thine eyes roll round the room and find no refuge. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, seem all awry. Oh! so thy conscience hangs in thee! 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.

Screwed at its axis against the side, the swinging lamp slightly oscillates in the dim cabin; and the Pequod settles lower in the sea with the added ballast of the oil boiling above;—that oil, but a day ago delving through the deep as animate matter—even now it burns here, steady as thy purpose burns in thee; and as the flame, thou dost set all in dancing motion about thee, and yet both thou and the flame maintain a permanent obliquity with reference to that which surrounds; though, in truth, both be infallibly straight, both makest obvious the false, lying levels among which they hang. And as that flame consumes both wick and wax, so thy purpose and thy quest consumes thee.

Fate hast delivered a cruel and telling blow ‘gainst the Jeroboam, as Fedallah did predict upon quitting her deck; and this from no special augury, for Ahab, too, saw the doom writ there in that long-togged scaramouch and incompetent Captain Mayhew. Today, not two weeks after the blasted words of Gabriel shook thee to thy core, we bespoke Captain Frost aboard the Hermes; they had come upon the Jeroboam, slack-sailed and wallowing in a following sea. As they passed, they saw naught but zombies upon her decks, and watched many of the vile fiends fall off and sink, nevermore to rise.

What wondrous abyssal depths did those zombies sink to, and in that crushing darkness—as dark and crushing as thy secrets—is even the Kraken safe from such monsters as these? Might not that zomby walk ashore in some distant Azore and spread the plague anew? Leave it, Ahab; thy unsleeping brain is battered and spins exhaustingly in ever wider circles.

At last amid this whirl of woe ye feel, a deep stupor steals over thee, as over the man who bleeds to death; for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings with thy quest, thy quill dips as does thy head, and thy prodigy of ponderous misery drags thee drowning down to nightmare sleep.

Chapter

The Castaway

It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman that a most significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew; an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.

Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats to harpoon whales. Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats’ crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with little Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine, so gloomy-jolly.

In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy, the ship’s steward, made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was very bright, with a pleasant, genial, jolly brightness. Pip loved life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires that showed him off to ten times the natural lustre; a lustre with which he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his glad ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine.

So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story.

It came to pass in the ambergris affair that Stubb’s after-oarsman chanced to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.

The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.

Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and neck.

Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, “Cut?” Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face plainly looked, Do, for God’s sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.

“Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved.

So soon as he recovered himself, poor little Pip was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew, and these he took to heart. Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, stick to the boat!, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when leap from the boat!, is still better.

Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin to jump in the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, “Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for hundreds of times what you’ll make on this voyage, Pip. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.” Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practiced swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned poor little Pip to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward is marked with the same ruthless detestation first seen in the schoolyard, and grown to full flower in military navies and armies.

But it so happened that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the boy went about the deck a bit cracked, and in addition to the portents and augury that came from him, a notion took him—getting through one of those cracks, as it were—and the notion was that he, Pip, was a zomby.

Though they called him Shammy[1], I knew he was not, for with these hands was I forced to kill such a one after long observation and no few attempts to succour that afflicted wight. Pip, if he was at all afflicted with this sad malady, it was related only as a passing sneeze to a raging deadly fever.

[1]A “Sammy Ireland,”—named after the master forger previously mentioned—is also known as a “Shammy;” one who believes himself a zomby though he has no disease about him. Though without contagion, yet such a one acts accordingly, attacking and attempting to devour his fellow man. The bitter irony is that the afflicted wight threatens real danger to himself and others. A human with all the cunning therein, and that cunning directed by zombie impulses, this a fearsome creature indeed. I have seen one, and killed it. There is no cure I have heard of, save death. The Shammy was first described by professor Brooks in his fine treatise on that unfortunate subject.

It came to pass that I had to speak out against the killing of Pip as a Shammy. The seamen aboard had heard much of zombies, yet knew very little, and none knew of this queer permutation of the plague. I however, as mentioned, had intimate and unfortunate dealings with one true Shammy and knew both their peril and their pathos; Pip was not one of those.

It took no small number of heated forecastle conversations to convince my fellow seamen of Pip’s harmlessness. The reputation and opinion of Ishmael at sea is as nothing compared to Ishmael of the Militia. I had nearly given up Pip’s cause for lost when one shipmate spoke up for me; it was Bulkington, of course. He looked more and more familiar to me with every passing day, or so it seemed. He said he fought side by side with me, in the dismal Virginian swamp of that name, soon after losing my Lil and Gennie, therefore it is not surprising to me that nothing remains in my memory of Bulkington, nor why he held me in both esteem and a sort of trembling dread, though his revelation did explain the cryptic looks he has been darting at me all voyage. As for Pip, the sailors relented, for Bulkington also enjoined them to be merciful, and the most vocal members of the crew soon saw Pip was no physical danger, as is a genuine Shammy.

The sea had jeeringly kept Pip’s finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself.

Chapter

An
Affair of Oil

That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.

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

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; forgot all the years-long slaughter and the black blanks where memories should live; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of all cares; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the well-made weapon, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally.

In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. If by some unaccountable means, all zombies could likewise be led to dip their cold hands in tubs of spermaceti, they would, I do believe, cease their slavering ways and, if not regaining some sliver of their severed humanity, at the very least, they would be more easy to kill.

Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.

First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but still contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.

There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.

Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan’s tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.

To learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally go in pairs,—a pike-and-gaff-man and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is similar to a highly favored Militia weapon of the same name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants’, would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.

Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.[1]

[1]I would fain be indecorous and have no wish to offend those who do not read footnotes. I refer herein to the whale’s prodigious male member.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a Militiaman carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.

That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer![1]

[1]Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.

Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.

The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels’ capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them—one man in each pot, side by side—many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical meditation and quiet cogitation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid—my soapstone for example—will descend from any point in precisely the same time. In the right trypot I finally puzzled out Bulkington’s riddle, as you soon will see.

Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.

It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business. “All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works.”

This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps, or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties.

These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres; it evoked in me some small freshet of memories of similar fires I had set. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.

The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet.

The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

Chapter

Asleep
at the Tiller

I stood at the Pequod’s ivory helm during this orgy of blood and flame, and for long hours silently guided the way of this devils-capering fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped in darkness myself for that interval, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm. That midnight in particular seemed to suck from out of me that which I could not face by will alone; I fell into a daze.

At dusk the sky glowed in shades of red-streaked umber at the rim of the world, deepening to a crimson glow due westward in the wake of the sun already gone down below the horizon. The harsh clamor of cicadas buzzed in the evening heat. I wended my way homeward to our cozy cabin at the edge of town, clutching the medicine for Gennie’s fever; medicine dearly bought after a long day splitting logs and wrestling them into place for the Turner’s new cabin.

It would lessen Lil’s burden to give the poor child some comfort from her fever, and, that being done, I could think of nothing better than dinner with Lilith in the soft glow of the lit lanterns. There ahead, across our grassy clearing I saw the golden glow from our cabin windows and the flickering reddish light from the fire; in the still evening air, smoke slowly rose in a smooth unblemished trail from the river-stone chimney, high up into the indigo infinity above, now spackled with stars; all about, enveloping me, was the fresh scent of cool evening dew and woodsmoke. I hurried my step.

Pushing open the door, a sharp unpleasant odor overpowered and befuddled me, for upon entering the house at this hour, usually was I met with some savory smell from whatever Lilith had prepared for supper. Instead I smelt a metallic smell, but wet and somehow torpid. The smell, or mayhap the overturned chair in the front room brought an inexplicable pang to my heart and I raced to the bedroom, bursting open the door to—to—to....

What comes surging back—a hard blow to my sternum—is color and sound; a horrible everywhere redness, and a gray pallor, and as water against a ship’s side but thicker somehow, and more dire, the slurping sloshing, sucking sound abhorrent beyond endurance.

There, prone on her back, lay Lilith, her beautiful fiery hair on the floor about her head, as a halo about her pale face and something dark soaking into it, but suddenly I could not see or think clearly; all sense had left me. Kneeling there by her side, was little Gennie, her own pale elbows buried in the pale and looping entrails of her mother, she did shovel them into her tiny, gore-smeared mouth; Lilith’s thick and copious blood spreading in a slow ooze toward my booted feet.

I know not how long I stood, struck dumb and blinded to my Self; I felt as if I were a hard-struck bell, all my being vibrating and a deafening clarion resounding in my battered brain; the scene as unreal as a fever dream.

Some whimpering noise of horrible disbelief finally welled up from deep inside me, a broken, keening sound; and at this mewling, that thing that once was my sweet little girl did dart its crimson-soaked face up from its gorging and, with fearful silent alacrity,—never taking its unblinking dead white eyes from mine—this thing leapt across Lilith’s still-beautiful corpse and graspingly advanced on me, hissing. To my everlasting shame, I fled in a daze, that soon turned to rage, whereupon I did go to the Walker house, of which sad business I bespoke previously. That portion of this grim tale came to me then with more clarity, but I will not speak of it again.

After my time with the Walkers, staggering back to our cabin, a feeling of greater unreality stole over me as I approached it. Though upon this occasion no smoke rose from the stone chimney, the lamps were yet lit, and I fancied that somehow this had all been a grand and elaborate jest, and my two girls would greet me at the door and we would laugh together while eating and finally retire to warm beds. Alas!

Gennie had gone, I knew not where, nor then cared, for all thoughts were of Lilith. Had Gennie come upon me then, it would have been Ishmael’s doom, and that gladly greeted, nay, embraced. For there, lying in her own filth, lay my Lilith, her hair still beautiful except where some of it was black and slick with blood. With frantic, febrile speed I then took the planks that were to have been for porch decking, and from them crafted a simple coffin. I then weepingly dug a deep grave under Lil’s favorite maple by the creek. I do not remember placing her body in that sad casket, but I do remember the sound of heavy clay as it smacked with hollow wetness against the coffin’s lid. After a foot of earth had covered it, I heard a thump and a hiss from within; ignoring it in my lunacy, I frantically shoveled in the rest of the dark dirt and finished by stacking upon the mound the largest river stones I could carry. Only then did I stagger off to be lost in laudanum’s haze of forgetting. I knew nothing more for what seems a long dark age of the earth.

Starting from this vision of woe, goaded from me by the red abomination of butchering and boiling the whale, I gradually became conscious of something fatally wrong, but still only stood there dumbly. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.

A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.

My God! what is the matter with me? thought I.

Lo! in my brief nightmare I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass! In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her!

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly.

Solomon says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e., even while living) “in the congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

Chapter

Young Life’s
Old Routine

Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and on the precise principle by which the Militia—as executioners of old—is entitled to the garments of the executed, the whale’s great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;—but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing—singing, if I may—the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.

While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many landslides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper.

At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.

In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.

But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale whaleboats and try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it.

Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. Every cask is out of sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.[1]

[1] Here then, is one way in which the Militia is not like the whaleman, and this difference being no small source of the disdain and shunning heaped upon him, moreso than the whaleman; for the Militia, as a general rule, do not spend overmuch time cleaning after battle, unless one is lucky enough to duck one’s head in a stream that has not been putrefied by the recent slaughter of the undead.

Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins!

But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again, as the old whaling chanty laments:

Oh a man must be mad, or want money bad,

To venture catching whales;

For he may well be drowned when the whale turns around,

Or his head may be smashed by the tail.

Though the work seems grand to the young green hand,

And his heart is high when he goes;

In a very short burst, you’ll hear his bitter curse,

At the cry of “There she blows!”

Oh! my friends, but this is man, killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from battleground defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—or Ware the Zomby!—the ghost is raised, and we sally forth to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!

And thus does all come back—in mine own orbit at least—to the damnéd zomby; what of metempsychosis for it? Has the soul that once resided in that fleshy residence fled to other habitation, as I pray it does? Or does the soul yet linger there, trapped in that rotting flesh, slavering in rage at its entrapment? If linger it does, though my skin crawls to think on it, then mayhap Ishmael did free many tortured souls—at the last returning to finally deliver those I held so dear!—sending them on along their journey.

I make no claim to know how it is, but however it truly is, mayhap I will some day teach her, too, how to splice a rope!

Chapter

The Doubloon

Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.

But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now needing some fresh interpretation for himself, to divulge whether, in some monomaniac way, some significance might lurk therein. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload.

Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed midst all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale’s talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to spend it.

On its round border it bore the letters, Republica Del Ecuador: Quito. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra. And unknown to the crew, this coin had yet another stamp, the stamp of a less spendable kind of fortune, but mayhap more valuable withal: that good fortune known by some as luck.

Before this equatorial coin, Ahab was now pausing.

“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as Lucifer adorn that auspicious coin. How well I know them. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself.

“Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, ‘tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here’s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then,” and so saying, he stalked off muttering.

Starbuck observed this as he stood leaning against the bulwarks. “No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to himself. “The old man seems to read Belshazzar’s awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read.

“A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.”

“There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, “he’s been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Beacon Hill or in Booble Alley, I’d not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once.

Halloa! here’s signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I’ll get the almanac, and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here’s the book. Let’s see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he’s always among ‘em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are—here they go—all alive:—Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among ‘em. Aye, here on the coin he’s just crossing the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanac!

To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that’s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here’s the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There’s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily aloft there, he wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let’s hear what he’ll have to say. There; he’s before it; he’ll out with something presently. So, so; he’s beginning.”

“I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won’t smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ‘em out.”

Hearing this, Stubb scratched the back of his neck wonderingly. “Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman—the old hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of the mast; why, there’s a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he’s back again; what does that mean? Hark! he’s muttering—voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!”

“If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what’s the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign—the roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.”

“There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the Cannibal? As I live, he’s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back country. And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of his thigh—I guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king’s trowsers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual, casting jettatura on all about him as usual. What does he say, with that look of his? He mutters in some throaty tongue and it sounds a dire portent, enough to make a man’s very bones shiver. Ah, Fedallah then makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin—fire worshipper, depend upon it. He leaves, muttering.

Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip—poor boy! would he had died, or I; he’s half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these interpreters—myself included—and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!”

“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”

“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”

“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”

“Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”

“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”

“Well, that’s funny.”

“And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all zombies; and I’m a zomby crowing, especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a zomby crow? And where’s the scare-crow to smash my skull? There he stands; two tattooed bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more tattooed bones poked out from the sleeves of an old jacket.”

“Wonder if he means that harpooneer, Queeueg?—poor lad!—I could go hang myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”

“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s nailed to the mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White Whale, Moby Dick! Why not call him Zomby Dick and be done with it!; he’ll nail ye!

“This here mast’s a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown over in it; some hapless cousin’s wedding ring, I guess. How did it get there? And so they’ll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! The green hand will get ye soon!

Hish! hish! God goes ‘mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us; or better yet, eat us raw! Raw manflesh and tasty brains!” Pip, his eyes wide, begins to dance a mad jig, arms all akimbo and feet beating against the deck; capering thus, he sings:

The old hen and chickens at the stack

An old hawk swoopt down mongst that pack

And struck that old boat a whack! amiddle of its back

And I do believe that is a fact.

Oh, Gennie! Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!

Gennie, Gennie! and get your hoe-cake done!

Chapter

Cross Bones

Ship ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?” So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat’s bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat.

“Hast seen the White Whale!”

“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet.

“Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him—“Stand by to lower!”

It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in the present instance, upon reaching the side of the English ship, all this was heightened by the sight of the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular ladder of nailed cleats there, and swinging towards him a pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, “I see, I see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle.”

As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own weight by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did’st thou see the White Whale?—how long ago?”

“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope; “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.”

“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so. Fedallah slithered smoothly up the manropes hanging over the side of the ship and stood silently, his black eyes intently focused on each ivory appendage.

“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”

“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”

“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,” began the Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling round so, that my boat’s crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”

“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath.

“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”

“Aye, aye—they were mine—my irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but on!”

“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly. “Well, this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!

“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick—I know him.”

“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was—the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the way, Captain—Mounttop; Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls alive, man—the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips.

We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here” (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); “yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell’s flames, I was thinking; when all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh—clear along the whole length of my arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon: Bunger, my lad,—the Captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn.”

“Belay that!” Ahab demanded, agitated. “Didst not feel his bite? Thou lost thy arm from steel alone? Wast thy arm not severed in the jaws of Moby Dick?” Ahab’s eyes darted to Fedallah whose own dark orbs had unwaveringly fastened his squint upon the ivory-armed Captain ere climbing aboard. The Parsee shook his head slightly at Ahab, as if to say, “Rest easy, Ahab, this one is not of our ilk.”

“No, not swallowed, surely not! I dare say had Moby Dick fastened his chompers in me I’d not talking with you now, praise fortune. But Dr. Bunger will tell you of it, old chap. Bunger?”

The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible to denote his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.

“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—“

“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”

“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot weather there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet—“

“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn’t see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o’clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I’d rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man.”

“My captain—you must have ere this perceived, respected sir,” said the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab, “—is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink—“

“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with the arm story.”

“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing, sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all rule”—pointing at it with the marlingspike—“that is the captain’s work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one’s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir”—removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a wound—“Well, the captain there will tell you how that came here; he knows.”

“No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.”

“What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.

“Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, “oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we didn’t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn’t then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick—as some call him—and then I knew it was he.”

“Did’st thou cross his wake again?”

“Twice.”

“But could not fasten?”

“Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he swallows.”

“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession—“Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d’ye see. No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.”

“No, thank ye, Bunger,” said the English Captain, “he’s welcome to the arm he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?”—glancing at the ivory leg.

“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”

“Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; “this man’s blood—bring the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!—his pulse makes these planks beat!—sir!”—taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab’s arm.

“Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—“Man the boat! Which way heading?”

“Good God!” cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put. “What’s the matter? He was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain crazy?” whispering this last to silent Fedallah.

But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take the boat’s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards him, commanded the ship’s sailors to stand by to lower.

In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the British ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.

The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.

And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured, or so it was rumoured.

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

Unwittingly here, one part of a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly have been disclosed before. With many other particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead.

Captain Peleg’s rumored reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; in fact, he knew not the deeper significance behind Ahab’s shuttered privacy; indeed, as touching all Ahab’s deeper part, every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, all the less damning details came out. That direful mishap was at the bottom of Ahab’s temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty—remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab—invested itself with terrors not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had all conspired to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it was that, not till a considerable interval had elapsed, was part of that truth known upon the Pequod’s decks, and even then, only Fedallah ever knew the whole of the mishap.

But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.

Ahab’s Log: Chapter

Unhealing Wounds

Ahab’s Log: November 22, 1851

Blast this accursed whalebone leg! Another and a stronger must be built posthaste. Utter folly it is to chance yet another unhealing wound such as that Ahab didst receive in Nantucket; it still gapes there ‘neath its binding, with unbleeding gray smacking lips, jabbing Ahab to wakefulness with its unremitting stab of agony; were Promethean pain welded to Damoclean dread, to be finally suffused with Ixion’s doom; then, then would such a thing touch the outermost edges of the torment this wound dost dredge forth from thee. And Fedallah’s own unhealing wound is yet more grievous, fairly oozing the mystery of its occurrence!

There is no mystery to thy grievous injury. Learning of thy role in the undead plague even now threatening the Union, ye wept with the guilt of it, and as a child did ye succumb to a frightful tantrum and flee Fedallah’s presence. And whence did ye flee? Where else but to the bottle, and to that tender ear of him who wieldest it. Staggering homeward, did ye come upon one of Fedallah’s crewmen and, flying into such a passionate rage, ye knocked him down and killed him dead with frantic stampings of thy whalebone leg, thereby shivering it from under ye to drunkenly fall upon its splintered sharpness. And yet, most queer circumstance of that whole affair, that man thus killed was in some wise replaced ere the closing of the following day, even as thy unbleeding wound set thee writhing there in thy marriage bed. Fedallah said naught regarding that underling’s demise, nor his replacement, as though it were no more concern to him than the changing of his shirt.

Were the crew to see thy unblooded gaping gash, and thereby divine that which thou hast become, thy fate would be summed in one word: mutiny; aye, and that hempen rope Fedallah prophesied would soon find thy neck, old man; and there would they leave ye to swing from that noose cast round the yardarm, thine eyes dined upon by sea fowl as thy corpse dangled in the breeze. Aye, Ahab, the extent of thy wound must be kept bound in all senses of that word.

What ye learned from that gash! Fedallah it was who found thee on those cold Nantucket cobbles, after thy unspeakable so-called accident; ivory leg shattered and spearing thee with a gash nigh thy centermost rudder. Oh, penance of the gods! The ragged rent in this flesh, not less than four inches in length, wet but frightfully bloodless; and thou aghast more at the bloodlessness than the searing pain.

Then didst Fedallah warn thee yet again of thy risk, Ahab; then didst thou learn more of thy curse, and of Fedallah’s besides; then did Fedallah unwrap that snowy turban from round his brown head and show thou his own frightful unhealing wound. Under that turbaned binding, his skullbone shone brightest white from beneath the patch of missing scalp, wee stitches of the skullbone joint stark there against the white. That gleaming white didst fade to dullest ivory, as of weathered whalebone, to disappear under a final bandage—looking to be some sort of toughened leather—that lay in the midmost part of that already horrible wound. This final bandage Fedallah lifted off his forehead, and there, in the very center was a hole, near identical twin to thy pivot hole in the deck above, as though a carpenter’s augur had burrowed wormlike into Fedallah’s skull (and could that be the source of his augury?); and there beneath that clean hole—as a hole to Hell—there lay his black pulsing brain!

That hole was also twin to the holes thou has seen drilled twice before in a zomby skull. Identical. What means this? Did the fiend Fedallah in some way escape some similar fate? He would not speak of it, but did portentously hint—as he covered and then rebound that hideous wound—that the injury was older than many men’s lifetimes. This last the Parsee bespoke with a tightness to his words, and a restraint to his tone, as though holding back a great rage.

Upon winding the turns in his turban, Fedallah’s voice rose and rose as did his rage, until it towered, consuming the very air in the room; aye, mounting up to the heavens and down to the depths of Hell to rattle Satan’s cage, and all the while screaming at Ahab. At Ahab! for Ahab’s part in putting Fedallah in such a place as a whaleboat, where none are safe and men grievous wounded and struck stone dead as a matter of course. Such a ranting unholy rage he did vent!, full of guttural utterances in his throaty mother tongue; a weeping, ranting, panting rage to strike no small emotion in thy own stony breast. Never again did such emotion spill from the Parsee, and from thence he seemed resigned to his fate as thy pilot, or so he cryptically hinted.

Does the onus for Fedallah’s risk truly belong to Ahab? Fedallah’s signs and augurs have told of this for nigh upon ten score years if he is to be believed. Where is will; where decision in this span of ages? How hast such a thing been foreseen, and how is it that naught can be done to shift this ghastly tide? Hast Ahab no power whatsoever that he must meekly do the bidding such that he is but time’s dumb marionette, woodenly manipulated by unseen strings, jerked about by hands from above? For what purpose? Is Ahab but slave to fate?

I say nay! Ten thousand times nay! Let Ahab tend to Ahab, for no prophecy controls Ahab, it is Ahab who controls prophecy; for those bone-shakers, those card-layers, those readers of entrails, they but tap into the passion Ahab wields like fire, like a burning sigil seen from afar; such a passion Ahab holds as has been read centuries prior and as will be sung centuries hence!, for it is Ahab’s lust for the black blood of Moby Dick they do sense, no more, and aye, no less, for it is vast as all creation! They do but read of Ahab’s rage and determination in goat guts spilled in sacred huts under hot foreign suns, for Ahab’s rage spans oceans! Ahab’s rage spans the globe, yea and out to suns unglimpsed; Ahab’s rage spans the very arch of time! It is a towering infernal terror to all who deign to glimpse beyond the veil of both past and future Nows; all signs seen by witches in their rude shacks or jaguar shamans in steam-soaked jungles: all do but portend of Ahab’s rage and thy final apotheosis in the slaying of Moby Dick!

Gather thyself, Old Thunder. Had ye not thy own rage both equal to and master of any other, any lesser man might have trembled before Fedallah’s passion, but Ahab is well accustomed to rages—of his own and other stout men, aye and some terrible rages of women, too—and hast not Ahab faced down undaunted the prodigious rage of countless forty-barrel bulls? and so, though the passion of the Parsee was terrible to behold and did kindle no small sympathy for him in Ahab’s breast, Ahab did not quaver like a craven cur before a thunderstorm, all a-tremble and frantic for some hiding place. Stonelike thou faced down Fedallah’s rage, as looking ever to windward in the bitterest Typhoon, for Ahab is Ahab and so didst thou remain unmoved at thy inmost core.

Naught will sway thee from thy purpose. And for this purpose, thou must have thy new leg, the better to steady thee for the darting of that barb through the heart of Moby Dick; the better to guard ‘gainst the crew seeing another unbleeding wound and staving Ahab’s skull for what he is. Light fire close under the blacksmith’s arse, Ahab, and light one under that blathering carpenter and get thy new leg under thee before the fate of the Jeroboam becomes thine own, old man. Belay this frantic scratching and to it!

Chapter

Ahab and
the Carpenter

The carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and without respect, for to him all human things held no special lofty properties. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark.

Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost say that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.

Carpenter [standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two lanterns busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red flame of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work.]

Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft, and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and shinbones. Let’s try another. Aye; this piece of whalebone now, much closer-grained and straighter; this works better [Sneezes].

Halloa, this bone dust is [Sneezes]—why it’s [Sneezes]—yes it’s [Sneezes]—bless my soul, it won’t let me speak! This is what an old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and you don’t get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don’t get it [Sneezes].

[To the Blacksmith] Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let’s have that ferule and buckle-screw; I’ll be ready for them presently.

Lucky now [Sneezes] there’s no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a mere shinbone—why it’s easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn him out as neat a leg now as ever [Sneezes] scraped to a lady in a parlor.

Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I’ve seen in shop windows wouldn’t compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored [Sneezes] with washes and lotions, just like live legs.

There; before I saw it off, now, I must call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right; too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that’s the heel; we are in luck; here he comes, or it’s somebody else, that’s certain.

Ahab [Advancing. During the ensuing scene,
the carpenters continues sneezing at times]

Well, manmaker!

Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let me measure, sir.

Measured for a leg! Good. Well, it’s not the first time. About it! There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.

Oh, sir, it will break bones—beware, beware!

No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. What’s Prometheus about there?—the blacksmith, I mean—what’s he about?

He must now be forging the buckle-screw, sir.

Right. It’s a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce red flame there!

Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.

Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what’s made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell’s probable. How the soot flies! Carpenter, when he’s through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades; there’s a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.

Sir?

Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Build him thus: fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to ‘em, to stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.

Now, what’s he speaking about, and who’s he speaking to, I should like to know? Shall I keep standing here?

[Ahab, aside] ‘Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here’s one. No, no, no; I must have a lantern.

Ho, ho! That’s it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.

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

I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.

Carpenter? why that’s—but no;—a very tidy, and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, carpenter;—or would’st thou rather work in clay?

Sir?—Clay? clay, sir? That’s mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.

The fellow’s impious! What art thou sneezing about?

Bone is rather dusty, sir.

Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people’s noses.

Sir?—oh! ah!—I guess so;—yes—dear!

Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?

Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?

It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is’t a riddle?

I should humbly call it a poser, sir.

Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!

Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I think I didn’t carry a small figure, sir.

Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.—How long before the leg is done?

Perhaps an hour, sir.

Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me.

[Turns to go]

Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. So rich I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.

Exit Ahab.
Carpenter [Resuming his work].

Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word: queer; he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer—sir—queer, queer, very queer. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his bedfellow! has a stick of whale’s jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he’ll stand on this.

What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all three places standing in one hell—how was that? Oh! I don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I’m a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body like me should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for life-boats.

And here’s the heron’s leg! long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he’s a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord.

Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and let’s finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old beer barrels, to fill ‘em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he’ll be standing on this to-morrow; he’ll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!

Chapter

Queequeg
in his Coffin

According to usage, the ship’s hold was pumped the next morning and lo! no inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown, and Starbuck went down into the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.[1]

[1]In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by the ship’s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.

Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands— Honshu, Hokkaido, and Shikoku. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again.

“Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to it. “On deck! Begone!”

“Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We must up Burtons[1] and break out.”

[1]A light two-block tackle used for hoisting.

“Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”

“Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir.”

“So it is, so it is; if we get it.”

“I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”

“And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak! I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life’s howling gale? Starbuck! I’ll not have the Burtons hoisted.”

“What will the owners say, sir?”

“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship’s keel.—On deck!”

“Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin, with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself; “A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab.”

“Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On deck!”

“Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be forbearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?”

Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!”

For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man.” And so saying he turned on his heel and left.

“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!” murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said—Ahab beware of Ahab—there’s something there! Aye, truer words could not be spoken.” Then unconsciously using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.

“Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the mate; then raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails, and close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burtons, and break out in the main-hold.”

Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight, sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they go; and so ancient and corroded and weedy the aspect of the lowermost puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone cask containing coins of Captain Noah. Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of barrel-staves and iron bundles of hoops were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit us then.

At this time it was that Queequeg, my poor pagan companion and fast bosom-friend was seized with a fever which brought him nigh to his endless end.

In this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown; dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but—as we have elsewhere seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the holders, so called.

Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a purple-spotted lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after some days’ suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door of death.

I tended to him when off duty, and how he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over me as I sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. Whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. So that—let us say it again—no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean’s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven.

Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he asked. He called me to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking my hand, reminded me that while in New Bedford he and I had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and I had told him that, before the zomby plague, all whalemen who died ashore were laid in those same dark canoes. The fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. He added that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, and tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those he had seen in New Bedford, all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.

Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was at once commanded to do Queequeg’s bidding, whatever it might include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard, and from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took Queequeg’s measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg’s person as he shifted the rule.

“Ah! poor fellow! he’ll have to die now,” ejaculated the carpenter.

When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, the carpenter lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.

Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one’s consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.

Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his boat. Also by his own request, biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. “Rarmai” (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced in his hammock.

But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slyly hovering near by all this while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.

“Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think he’s in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for look! he’s left his tambourine behind;—I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I’ll beat ye your dying march.”

“I have heard,” murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?—Hark! he speaks again: but more wildly now.”

“Form two and two! Let’s make a zomby of him! Ho, where’s his harpoon? Lay it across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!—mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!—take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! But wait! Shall he be called forth from his mushroom berth? Best that Pip be gone if that come to pass, for Pip’s a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat! Devoured by the plague! I’d never beat my tambourine over base Pip if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all cowards—shame upon them! Let ‘em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!”

During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.

But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no need of the carpenter’s box: and thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of his sudden convalescence was this;—at a critical moment, he had consulted Yojo who told Queequeg he had yet one more task; and therefore had Queequeg changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, with some disdainful confusion, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort could do so.

Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight.

With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent in carving the lid and interior with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving to copy the twisted tattooing on his body. This tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries on his skin were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved—by him at least—to the last.

Chapter

Blood-
Forged Steel

Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again after concluding his contributory work for Ahab’s leg, but still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man’s was a patient hammer, wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was.—Most miserable!

A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.

Belated—and not innocently—one bitter winter’s midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was the loss of the extremities of both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of the grief of his life’s drama.

He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror![1] Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith’s shop was in the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old husband’s hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor’s iron lullaby, the blacksmith’s infants were rocked to slumber.

[1]Alcohol. Also an historical figure. In 1749 a performer, self-named The Great Bottle Conjurer, claimed the ability to fit himself entirely into a quart bottle. A full theater of people paid to see such a feat, but when they found it to be a hoax, the enraged crowd proceeded to destroy the theater.

Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.

Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls! Perth’s blacksmith’s soul responded to his vicissitudes; and so, Perth went a-whaling.

With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the other at his forge’s lungs, when Captain Ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag that rattled alarmingly like Vander’s leathern bag of gold-filled zomby teeth. While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the anvil—the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights, some of which flew close to Ahab.

“Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens,[1] Perth? they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they burn; but thou—thou liv’st among them without a scorch.”

[1]Mother Carey’s chickens: a sailor’s name for the storm petrel, a ship-following seabird that, during storms, will hunker down on a ship’s leeward side.

“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching; not easily canst thou scorch a scar.”

“Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How canst thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou canst not go mad?—What wert thou making there?”

“Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.”

“And canst thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard usage as it had?”

“I think so, sir.”

“And I suppose thou canst smooth almost any seams and dents; never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?”

“Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”

“Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with both hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here—here—can ye smooth out a seam like this, blacksmith,” sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow; “if thou could’st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer! Canst thou smooth this seam?”

“Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?”

“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for though thou only see’st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone of my skull—that and more is all wrinkles! But, away with child’s play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!” jingling the leathern bag, as if it were full of gold coins. “I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There’s the stuff,” flinging the pouch upon the anvil. “Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses.”

“Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here the best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.”

“I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I’ll blow the fire.”

When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. “A flaw!” rejecting the last one. “Work that over again, Perth.”

This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to him the glowing rods, one after the other.

As the hard pressed forge shot up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed, and bowing over his head towards the fire, was heard to utter some guttural curse or blessing over the steel. Then, when Ahab looked up, he slid aside.

“What’s that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?” muttered Stubb, looking on from the forecastle. “That Parsee smells fire like a friction match; and smells of it himself, like a hot musket’s powder-pan.”

At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water nearby, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab’s bent face.

“Would’st thou brand me, Perth?” wincing for a moment with the pain; “have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?”

“Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for the White Whale?”

“For the white fiend ! But now for the barbs; thou must make them thyself, man. Here are my razors—the best of steel; here, and make the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.”

For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain not use them.

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

Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.

“No, no—no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in their dark flesh, and the thick crimson liquid intermixingly glistening in the vessel in which it was collected. The White Whale’s barbs were tempered then with a spattering hiss; a smell as of burnt iron and copper comingled to suffuse the air.

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.

Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, “Good! and now for the seizings.”

At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so, with intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin, a light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it!

Chapter

Fedallah's Prophecy

Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed it with the Pequod. For next day after forging that diabolical steel, the freshening wind found us, whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.

It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done, and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.

Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying—the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.

“He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger’s unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way.

“Oh, thou dark hoary half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me.

“Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but unliving now.

“Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!”

The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab’s.

The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and the lantern hanging from its top cast a troubled flickering glare upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which gently chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.

Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the whale and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah ran shuddering through the air.

Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he.

“Of the hearses? Have I not said that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine? Have I not said the coffin shall be the salvation of the baptized who may one day triumph?”

“Who are hearsed that die upon the sea? And by what means could a coffin ever proffer salvation?”

“I said that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America,” then muttering bitterly to himself, unheard by Ahab, “And a caulked coffin for him whose final goal we buy with these lives; your two score and ten, and my centuries.”

“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a sight we shall not soon see.”

“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen.”

“And what was that saying about thyself?”

“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee, thy pilot.”

“And when thou art so gone before—if that ever befall—then ere I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?—Was it not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.”

“Take another pledge, old man, for ye do not know in all clarity what I see, nor ken what I say,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom— “Thou art the baptizer, not the baptized, and I your altar-boy. I say it again: hemp only can kill thee.”

“The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea,” cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;—“Immortal on land and on sea!”

Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead whale was brought to the ship.

Chapter

Smashing
the Quadrant

The Season on the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab, coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle the whale jaw tiller, and the eager mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship’s prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his latitude.

Now, in that Japanese sea where Ahab lost his leg, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. Well that Ahab’s quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses through which to take sight of that solar fire. Swinging his seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship’s deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab’s, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness.

At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling into a moment’s revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to himself: “Thou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I am—but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall  be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him!”

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: “Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light. Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level dead reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!”

As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled the troubling device with both his live and dead feet, a proud triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee’s face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out—“To the braces! Up helm!—square in!”

Then as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, glancing at the broken quadrant, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, Nantucket soundings, and then looking from the quadrant to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together. He pried out the cork with the ivory of his own teeth, hesitated, gazing at it for a long moment, then upended the vial and the sand whispered down to be swallowed by the sea.

In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her long, ribbed hull seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient steed.

Standing between the knight-heads in the bow, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck. The mate muttered, “I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!”

“Aye,” cried Stubb, overhearing, “but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck—sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab grumble, ‘Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.’ And damn me, Ahab, but Stubb says thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!”

Chapter

The
Cruellest Fangs

Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, in these resplendent Japanese seas, the mariner encounters the direst of all storms: the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb of zombies upon a dazed and sleepy town.

Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every flash of the lightning glancing aloft at the storm-torn canvas, to see what additional disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship’s high teetering side, stove in the boat’s bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a sieve.

“Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the wreck, “but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps: all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I have to meet it is just across the deck here. But never mind; it’s all in fun: so the old song says;”—[Sings]

Oh! jolly is the gale,

And a joker is the whale,

A’ flourishin’ his tail,—

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

The scud all a flyin’,

That’s his flip only foamin’;

When he stirs in the spicin’,—

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

Thunder splits the ships,

But he only smacks his lips,

A tastin’ of this flip,—

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

“Avast Stubb!” cried Starbuck, “Let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace.”

“But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And when that’s done, ten to one I come back a zomby and sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.”

“Madman! Zombies neither speak nor sing! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.”

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

“Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder and pointing his hand towards the weather bow, “Markest thou not that the gale comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand—his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou must!

“I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?”

“Yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,” soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s question. “The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning.”

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.

“Who’s there?”

“Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire.

Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel’s way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a ship’s lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.

“The rods! the rods!” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and aft. Quick!”

“Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here, though we be the weaker side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himalayas and Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir.”

“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! the corpusants!”

All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic black wax tapers before a black altar.

“Blast the boat! let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!”—but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried—“The corpusants have mercy on us all!”

To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His “Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin” has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.[1]

[1]In the Book of Daniel, this was the writing on the wall; translated, it means: Your rule is over; you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting; your kingdom will be divided.

While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, Daggoo, the gigantic African, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light, Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body.

The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was Stubb. “What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same in the song.”

At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly beginning to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! see!” and once more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.

“The corpusants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb, again.

At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, others remained rooted to the deck; all with eyes upcast.

“Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So.”

Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.

“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed.

“No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”

[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.]

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Blindfolded, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! Thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her?

There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”

“The boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old man!”

Ahab’s harpoon, the blood-quenched one forged at Perth’s fire, this dire harpoon remained firmly lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat’s bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent’s tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm—“God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! ‘tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”

Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces—though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate’s thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half-mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s end.

“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!” And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.

As during the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab’s, many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay.

Chapter

A Musket
to the Head

During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod’s jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached to it—for they were slack—because some play to the tiller was indispensable.

In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod’s; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.

Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb—one engaged forward and the other aft—the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.

The three corresponding new sails were bent and reefed, and a storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the water with some precision again; and the course—East-south-east—which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more given to the helmsman. During the violence of the gale, he had only steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze became fair!

Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “Ho! The fair wind! Oh-ye-ho, cheerily men!” the crew singing for joy, that so promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding it.

In compliance with the standing order of his commander—to report immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change in the affairs of the deck,—Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze—however reluctantly and gloomily,—than he mechanically went below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.

Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man’s bolted door, a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blended with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself.

“He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very musket that he pointed at me; that one with the studded stock; let me touch it—lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;—that’s not good. Best spill it?—wait. I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly while I think.—I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom—that’s fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind that’s only fair for that accursed fish.—The very tube he pointed at me!—the very one; this one—I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.—Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods?

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?—Yes, it would make him the willful murderer of thirty men and more if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way.

If he were this instant—put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,—in there, he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I can’t withstand thee then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor, that weathered head strapped to the decking; then he would be more hideous than a caged zomby with fresh flesh just out of reach. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage homeward.

What remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law.—Aye, aye, ‘tis so.—Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against the door.

“On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary! Mary!—my boy! Eben! Eben!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day or week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? Shall I?”

“Stern all! Oh, Moby Dick, I clutch thy squirming heart at last!”

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

The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel; Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he placed the death-tube in its rack and left the place, staggering up the aft hatchway to the deck above.

“He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to say.”

Chapter

The Needle

Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.

Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.

“Ha-ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”

But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.

“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.

“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”

Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.

Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.

But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunderstorm turned our compasses—that’s all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.”

“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate, gloomily.

Here, it must needs be said that accidents like this have in more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.

Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.

For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.

“Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—bring me a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles. Quick!”

Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtle skill in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors without some shudderings and evil portents.

“Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, “my men, the thunderstorm turned old Ahab’s needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own that will point as true as any.”

Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But Starbuck looked away.

With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it—whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, none could tell—he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—“Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”

One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.

In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.

Chapter

The Log & Line

While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form’s sake than anything else, regularly putting down in the logbooks the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel of line and angular log attached to its end hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab as he happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.

“Forward, there! Heave the log!”

Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. “Take the reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”

They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.

The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.

Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to speak.

“Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.”

“‘Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”

“I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine ‘tis not worth while disputing, ‘specially with a superior, who’ll ne’er confess.”

“What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s granite-founded College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert thou born?”

“In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”

“Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”

“I know not, sir, but I was born there.”

“In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.”

The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.

“Hold hard!”

Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was gone.

“I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See to it.” The order given, Ahab lurched to his pivot hole.

“There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?”

“Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing. Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here, though I am a bit peckish and gnawing on some coward flesh might be just the thing. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off for sandwiches—we haul in no cowards here, lest we eat ‘em. Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”

“Peace, thou crazy loon!” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. “Away from the quarter-deck!”

“The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, again advancing. “Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?

“Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”

“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that flesh should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy?”

“Zomby-boy, sir; ship’s-gnasher; gnash-gnash, chomp-chomp! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly, and best identified by the zomby bite on him—quickest known by that! Zombies want to eat his flesh! Who’s seen Pip the delicious coward?”

“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.”

“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost to zombies! This hand seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. I do think I now hold the right hand of God. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go. ”

“No boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye who believe that in gods reside all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy small dark hand than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”

“There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness.

Chapter

Thus Falls Bulkington

Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab’s new log and line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.

At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of all—declared that the wild thrilling sounds we heard were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.

Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. Ahab hollowly laughed, and thus explained the wonder.

Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.

At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the ship; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

And so it was that the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible confirmation in the fate of one of our number that morning. I was saddened to learn it was enigmatic Bulkington who had fallen. At sun-rise he went from his melancholy hammock to his stand his mast-head watch at the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with Bulkington there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry so freighted with rage and woe that it evoked in me a frisson of recognition though I knew not then from whence it came. With that frightful cry and a rushing whoosh—looking up, we saw a falling phantom in the air; and then looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.

The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it from below, and the sun having long beat upon this cask, it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed poor Bulkington to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.

And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man—mysterious Bulkington—was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it not as a foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.

Chapter

Zomby Brothel

For some weeks I had felt a vague, disturbing memory work its way upward and outward from my innermost mind, as a sliver slowly works its way surfaceward from itchy livid skin. Bulkington was that sliver, I now knew, and events transpiring aboard the Pequod served to tweeze that memory from me, the first hint being Bulkington’s cryptic comment of our shared past. But of late, Bulkington had been savage moody—more so than usual. Prior to his fall had been caught slinking about the ship on more than one occasion, once during the darkest watch of the night. Cabaco, his dearest friend—the two were as close as close could be—had many times evinced his consternation regarding the agitated state Bulkington had attained.

According to Cabaco—speaking earnestly with me even as he grieved for the loss of Bulkington—Cabaco related that Bulkington believed there were zombies aboard the Pequod—Bulkington insisted repeatedly that he could smell them—and he feared Ahab and Fedallah were both so afflicted. Such lunacy! or so I then thought, for Bulkington was ever queer, and fiercely quiet; he was also a more superstitious fellow than most; and in light of earlier revelations regarding the superstitious nature of whalemen, this then is no small thing. Cabaco believed Bulkington’s fearful suspicions had begun to form many months previous, when, early in the voyage Archy had heard those mysterious sounds from below, in the aft hold.

Such a scream Bulkington made as he fell! Horribly enraged, and yet anguished beyond endurance; it grew in volume as he hurtled waterward and then with a wet finality, the sound cut short, as if severed by a boarding sword. A shuddering thrill of memory passed back into me upon hearing that scream, much as an approaching squall sends before it a riffled patch of water. That scream, so chilling to hear; I had heard it before, and from the same throat.

Bulkington’s wail did not alone account for the flickering return of memory. The mad ravings Ahab shouted from his febrile bed, so loud they could be heard aboveboard,—acknowledged by no sailor, yet the mates did glance worriedly askance when they heard them—this also played a role, for Bulkington, I now remembered, did also shout so when we first discovered him, shaking and naked in the bushes, raving in the depths of what I assumed was a laudanum fit, that tremblingly vomitous affair. At the time, I had only recently recovered somewhat from my own deep and abiding need for the foul stuff, and so, used some of my precious dwindling reserves to bring Bulkington to some semblance of rationality.

For several days after Bulkington’s fall, when off watch, I pondered out the riddle of him in the empty starboard try pot—for therein did I do my best cogitating, snug in its enveloping shade, even as Bulkington, now fathoms upon fathoms behind and below the Pequod, still sank slowly downward.

As I lay there in the try pot, stewing, as it were, the scenes Bulkington inhabited began to come back to me as fits and flashes of memory, as though lightning lit, bursting in my brain to paint pictures I would fain forget; and yet, I would solve the mystery of Bulkington. So, with no small resolve, and some trepidation, I strove to piece together the meaning in these flashes; for as with a lighting flash, though you no longer see the bolt, yet some dim afterimage remains clearly before you even with closed eyes.

Some few months after acquiring my axes, I had assumed command of my Militia band and we were prowling deep into the western edge of Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, south of Suffolk. There had been reports of zombies lurching out from that tangled jumble of steamy swamp in puzzling numbers. We went to investigate and to gather all the scalps we could.

It was full summer, and in the heavy humid heat, sweat soaked our every article of clothing, and this the least of our troubles. Dense clouds of mosquitoes and biting gnats buzzed about us, seeking blood, and by all accounts, no small number of zombies lurched about in the dense concealing undergrowth.

Of the zombies reported thereabouts, many appeared to have been former slaves. This was no surprise to us as The Dismal—so we called it—had long been a place of refuge for such poor wights as escaped their bondage. But among those zombies coming from the swamp were also many others, many of whom were white, and no small number of whom who had been well-to-do. This was puzzling for at least two reasons: there were many more zombies lurching from the swamp’s western edge than rationality warranted, for though there were undoubtedly many former slaves hunkered down in that wilderness in relative safety, there were not so many as then streamed forth from that soggy, squelching, itchy wilderness; but even more puzzling was that such august personages as were found coming out of the swamp—now zombies—had no business being in The Dismal at all, or so it seemed.

As I recalled the faces of the eight members of my troupe, my heart leapt with gladness uknlooked for, because there, in my mind’s eye, were two of my dearest companions from that time: Quay Chang, a Chinaman whom we had chanced to meet some weeks earlier at the port in Chesapeake, newly arrived from China and seeking his brother in the West; and Dred, himself an escaped slave with a storied and troubled past who had spent much time in The Dismal, and who had been with this Militia band since its inception. From them I did learn more than from any schoolmaster’s stale lessons.

Dred—a name he received from his mother—was not an unusual name among slaves of Mandingue descent, and is generally given to those of great physical force. He early acquired the power of reading, by an apparent instinctive faculty, and like other children of a deep and fervent nature, he developed great religious ardor, and often surprised his elders by his questions and replies on this subject. The impression seemed to prevail universally that this child was born for extraordinary things; and perhaps it was his yearning to acquire liberty that became his greatest strength. At the time of his father’s execution for rebellion, Dred was a lad of fourteen. He was a witness of the undaunted aspect with which his father and the other conspirators met their doom. The memory dropped into the depths of his soul, as a stone drops into the desolate depths of a dark mountain lake.

Sold to a distant plantation, Dred became noted for his desperate, unsubduable disposition. He joined in none of the social recreations and amusements of the other slaves, labored with proud and silent assiduity, but, on the slightest rebuke or threat, flashed up with a savage fierceness, which, supported by his immense bodily strength, made him an object of dread among overseers. He was one of those of whom they gladly rid themselves; and, like a fractious horse, was sold from master to master. Finally, an overseer, hardier than the rest, determined on the task of subduing him. In the scuffle that ensued Dred struck him to the earth, a dead man, then made his escape to The Dismal, and was never afterwards heard of in civilized life.

Dred said his life then passed in a kind of dream. Sometimes, traversing for weeks in these desolate regions, he would compare himself to Elijah traversing for forty days and nights the solitudes of Horeb; or to John the Baptist in the wilderness, girding himself with camel’s hair, and eating locusts and wild honey. Sometimes he would fast and pray for days; and then voices would seem to speak to him, and strange hieroglyphics would be written upon the leaves. In less elevated moods of mind, he would pursue, with great judgment and vigor, those enterprises necessary to preserve existence. From the restlessness of his nature, he had not confined himself to any particular region, but had traversed the whole swampy region.

Dred had hidden in The Dismal for some eighteen months, outwaiting his former master’s agents after his harrowing escape; he it was who led us deeper into The Dismal then, for he intimately knew the ways of its soggy bogs. Some of the run-away slaves, Dred told us, had resided within these damp environs for twelve, twenty, or thirty years and upwards, subsisting themselves in the swamp upon corn, hogs, and fowls that they raised on some of the spots not perpetually under water, nor subject to be flooded, as forty-nine parts out of fifty of it are; yet these have always been perfectly impenetrable to any of the white inhabitants of the country around, even to those nearest to and best acquainted with the swamps. Dred would not take us to such places, he said, for he had sworn never to reveal the location of those who had granted him succour, and he would not break this oath. He said, “Them that live there would rather be shot than took; and they’d sooner shoot you than either of them former options. They ain’t afraid of plunder neither, so mind your eye.”

Dred showed us plants we could use to stave off the worst of the onslaught from the murderous mosquitoes; but mosquitoes were not our most fearsome worry, of course, for this swamp—also known as the Great Alligator Dismal swamp—was home to poisonous snakes as well as those ravenous reptiles, and Vander spoke at great length of giant burrowing millipedes with a taste for flesh; and, lest it be forgotten, no small number of zombies also infested the area. It seemed a fearsome, foreboding place; no fit abode for civilized man. The swamp is scarcely passable in many parts, owing not only to the softness of the sponge, but to the obstruction caused by innumerable shrubs, vines, creepers, and briars, which often take entire possession of the surface, forming dense thickets.

We were in the dreariest and wildest part of The Dismal; the darkness crowed out from dense thickets, the air damp, and the ghastly silence broken only by the hooting of owls and crying coughs of wild cats. For two hours after dusk we made our way through the Stygian darkness of the forest, lit fitfully from above by a near-full moon that threw ominous shadows. Dred had just led us to a rare patch of higher and drier ground on which to pitch our bivouac when a scream tore through the night. Instantly, all weapons were at the ready; all hooting and all chatter of insects ceased and an eerie calm suffused the muggy air, faintly pierced by the mosquito’s whine. The anguished scream came again. It was no shamble-man’s scream, that was certain, for there was much emotion in it, both rage and woe and no small hint of madness. Again it tore through the stillness, a short way north of us, from what looked to be a dense bower of brambles. We approached it warily, weapons at the ready.

As we neared the bramble thicket, Dred called out, his query instantly throttled by the cry, now close enough to make our hackles rise and quiver. We came round the thicket and there sat a large man, naked and shivering, his hands torn and filthy with blood and dirt; he was covered in welts, here and there leeches hung suckingly from his skin, jet black bladders of blood, full to bursting. We stood speechless at such a sight. He was heard to mutter, over and anon, “They have her, they have her, they have her,” until, building forth like pressure in a steam boiler, he again let forth his horrible cry. Five of our members moved to form a wide perimeter, for such cries as these were likely to bring forth any zombies hereabouts, while Dred, Quay Chang and I approached the man cautiously, speaking soothingly, with hands empty and outstretched, for lunacy is a powerful opponent. The man seemed not to notice us at all, his eyes vacant and staring.

He came with us docilely enough. After scraping the leeches from him, and clothing and feeding him, the big man fell to shaking and vomiting, showing all the signs of laudanum sickness, whereupon I proffered my own supply, and he sank into an exhausted, febrile slumber. Upon waking late the next day and another dose of laudanum, Bulkington then told us a tale that is yet difficult to believe. He and his lovely young wife, Pollyanna, had booked passage on a barge up the canal that ran along the eastern edge of The Dismal, up from Hintonsville in the south to Portsmouth in the north, that means of travel being both easy and pleasant. However, they had booked passage on the wrong barge, for no sooner were they deep in the swamp than Bulkington and his wife were subdued, hog-tied and blindfolded, and roughly delivered to their doom.

Deep in the middle of The Dismal—near 2,000 square miles of it—lies Lake Drummond, residing there like a wetly beating heart, and up a feeder canal to this lake were Bulkington and his wife conveyed, finally reaching what Bulkington guessed was the far western side of that lake, to an overgrown cove, and on its shore lay a welter of spavined hovels. There, Bulkington told us, he and Pollyanna were drugged and subjected to unimaginable ignominies. But the worst was yet to come.

This was a place of the most ill and evil repute. Therein—for a price—any man could come and slay a zomby, or worse. A brisk trade was made of selling the right to slaughter a zombie, once it was deemed no longer useful for other pecuniary means. Wealthy patrons who wished to violate or slaughter a zomby without the danger inherent in doing so in the wild, so to speak, laid their money down and got in line. And if any were subsequently infected, as it seemed often happened, this was no bother to such men as ran the place; those so affected simply moved from the ranks of the paying customer to the festering ranks of the chattel.

The rogues running the establishment had immediately separated Bulkington from Pollyanna. Frantic with worried panic despite the regular doses of laudanum, Bulkington had clawed through the damp earth under his cell and thereby escaped to seek help. We set out that very afternoon for the zomby brothel, soon found it and secluded ourselves in a large thicket of brambles from which we could easily observe the horrid place.

That which we beheld was more foul than any thing I ever could imagine, even had I lived as long as Fedallah. We watched, all of us sickened, until the drunken debauchery neared its height. Our plan had been to wait until the early morning when all parties—all of whom were festooned with pistols and other weapons—were asleep or dead drunk. But as we watched, a pair of hard-looking men moved a slight, stumbling burlap-hooded figure from one hovel to another, and upon this sight, Bulkington came entirely unhinged and could no longer be restrained.

Flailing from our grasp, he bellowed, “Pollyanna!” and, with that inarticulate scream of rage and woe and madness we had earlier heard, Bulkington grabbed Vander’s boarding sword and launched himself from our place of concealment, charging the men who manhandled his wife. Quay Chang, Dred and I followed immediately behind him, and I warned the others to stand ready.

The manic strength of an insane rage is terrible to behold. Before the drunken louts knew what transpired, Bulkington had slashed one across the face and deep into his neck, which spouted gouts of blood, black and shining in the torchlit night, and without an instant’s pause, Bulkington then buried the boarding sword to the hilt in the guts of the other man, who went down with a surprised choking grunt to grovel there in the mud, mewling pathetically. Dred quickly despatched the cur.

Deranged with relief, Bulkington reached for his tightly bound wife, and as he frantically cut her bonds, she reached for him with desperate longing. Panting, Bulkington carefully cut the final rope from round her neck and slipped the burlap sack from off her head. Suspecting the worst, I was there at the ready, and when his wife—who had truly once been a beautiful young woman—I say, when this former beauty lunged, hissing, to rip out Bulkington’s throat, I was at the ready and grasped her by the hair and savagely yanked her back out of reach, yea, altogether out of Bulkington’s grasp. Quay Chang, also reading ahead, had immediately pulled Bulkington aside so he would not see what I needs must do. It was quickly if not gladly done.

Bulkington however, was thereafter lost to us. He stood as a deaf mute, nor moved of his own volition, nor seemed even to breathe, his eyes two horrid pits of blankness. Seeing that ghastly stare, the loss of my own Lilith then came back to me in all its dreadful force and sent me on such a berserker rampage as to swallow all memory of particulars. We killed all zombies and all the so-called men therein, freed the few poor wights not yet infected by these fiends, and, leaving the small fortune of scalps where they lay, and using what large store of moonshine that remained after we had taken all we could carry, we burned the place to the sodden ground. It was a grim business.

Some days later, we staggered out from the swamp’s western edge, into improbably bright morning sunshine—for how could the sun shine on such deeds as those we had witnessed? We made our way north, to Portland. Bulkington had recovered enough to speak, but only when spoken to, and that in monosyllables; he wept most nights. He made it known he would ship aboard a whaler, and never again set foot upon land if he could help it. We saw him safely signed aboard The Grampus.

Just past Portland’s outskirts, Quay Chang asked for a private word with me. We had grown close in the months since meeting, and he knew much of my own sad story, and I of his, and in that short time he earned from me a deep, abiding respect. His hand firmly gripping my left shoulder, he touched my face lightly with his other hand and said, “You must go to them and deliver them from their suffering, and thereby deliver yourself from yours.” I nodded, knowing in my heart the truth of his words, however impossible they were to then enact. With no further words, Quay Chang turned from the rising sun, and with nary a backward glance, walked into the west.

Ah, thou untrammeled sun! None can stay hid from thee; not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, nor fully developed. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” All.

He who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But as for Bulkington? He was such a man. Through my patchy try pot remembrance, Bulkington became yet more unfathomable than Solomon himself in my estimation. Bulkington was now unfathomable in sooth, sinking in our wake, down and down and down into that final dark.

Chapter

The Afterhold

[The Captain’s Cabin, Ahab moving to go on deck;
Pip catches him by the hand to follow]

“Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be, loose though thou art.”

“No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.”

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

“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose zomby bones now show white through all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.”

“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.”

“Oh good Captain, Captain, Captain!

“Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.”

[Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward]

“Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me.

“Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!

“Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?—little Alabama lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.

“Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh, Captain! Captain! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.”

“Hist! What’s that? A knock from astern? It must be another guest here to toast shame upon all cowards; but whence comes this knock? Ah! it comes from behind this great map. Halloa! there is some sort of clever door here. Mayhap it leads to my Captain, or leastways it leads to another dinner guest, I guess. And look, the map swings aside, all stiff on its top, fastened to a long thin strip of hinged iron. And here’s the clever door latch. The thumps come quicker from our dinner guest. Hungry, hungry. Coming, good sir; coming, Commodore.

“Well, hello there, brother. Why are you all tied up tight like that? Why is your head lashed to the decking? Is that so? Well, since we are brothers, though you have no legs, I see, I will free you from this bondage. First let me clear that odd pulsing mushroomy thing sprouted up from this hole in your brow. That’s better. Ah, no need to thank me; no need to thank me, for are we not brothers? Once free, mayhap we can find Pip and sup on some tasty coward flesh, for already has Pip been well toasted, and I hear toasted coward is a tasty dish! Now, first to this rope about your neck!”

Chapter

A Coffin for a Life-Buoy

The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going to leave the ship’s stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and innuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin.

“A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting.

“Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb.

“It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here can arrange it easily.”

“Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so—the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.”

“And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a hammer.

“Aye.”

“And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a caulking-iron.

“Aye.”

“And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his hand as with a pitch-pot.

“Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”

“He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he balks. Now I don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won’t put his head into it. And now I’m ordered to make a life-buoy of it.—I don’t like it at all; it’s undignified; it’s not my place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin timber, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end.

But heigh-ho! Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over the ship’s stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters would be tied up in the rigging ere they would do the job. But I’m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don’t budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind.

Hem! I’ll do the job, now, tenderly. May as well leave in the ship’s biscuit and the water and tarpaulin and all, as it would be right handy in a pickle, as it were, ha-ha. I’ll have me—let’s see—how many in the ship’s company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Any way, I’ll have me thirty separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin.” Thus muttering to himself, the carpenter went for some rope to fashion his Turk-head life-lines and did not see the eely shape slip up to the coffin and rummage about under the tarpaulin, and then away with a sliding celerity.

A brief moment later, Queequeg approached the coffin, also peering within, as though to check the spelling on all the wild symbols he had so carefully carved within the coffin; and, after leaving some small additional token within, Queequeg moved away before the carpenter—still mumbling— returned with his coil of rope.

“This rope will be fine, fine. If the hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s to it.”

Ahab’s Log: Chapter

The Starboard Hand of Woe

Ahab’s Log: December 29, 1851

Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and this poor heart throbs, and this poor brain beats too much for that. And yet, of late I’ve thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, as do those tendrils thread their way further up thy spine to populate thy brain, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How thy wild inner winds do blow it; they whip it about within thee as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. And it’s blown by a vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of insane asylums, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted.

Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, ‘tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!

And yet, strong winds or no, 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, or dashes it from some dumb zomby brain. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, and is only a patriot to heaven’s purpose. 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 Oh! poor, noble, heaven-crazed Pip; may eternal delight and deliciousness be his. Ah, Pip! thou heart of my heart, thy darkly fevered brow, in reposing sleep dost appear as unlined as any babe’s, but hot as fire, as that febrile bite does its yeasty unthinking deed! Ah, Pip! Ah, Pip, poor Pip, called me thy God? and knew not that what he called God was more demon and damned than divine; for what god would foist such fate upon his creature? Indeed, Ahab, that is thy own looming question, is it not? If this be the lesson, old man; will ye learn it?

Ah, but the lesson is an empty one, for the White Whale even now awaits to wreak similar destruction on any other, him the blasted primary mover of all this foul circumstance. So: I leave eternity to Thee, thou Uncreated; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God? Whence comes the learning from such woe!

Mayhap this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to thee whose name is more to him than goodness! Woe to thee who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to thee who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to thee who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!

Ah, Pip, thou castaway, Ahab shall forego a portion of his own potion and give it to thee that thou may yet live, after a fashion. Fedallah counsels otherwise, but I tire of his tyranny, and question whence comes his vision, for does he not prophesy only woe; does he not prophesy his own demise, and Ahab’s to boot? This cannot be sooth. I believe him less and less. Yet the palpable power he holds over Ahab—over Ahab!—I have struggled against it, and armed with righteous anger at Pip’s infection—born from Ahab’s own loving kindness—armed with this righteous rage, I have this moment overcome Fedallah’s power and refused him his desire, for he did counsel to bind Pip and use him for the feasting ground of his pale powder, to sow his vile spore in Pip’s brain. I cannot do it; I will not! For the Pequod is but a floating kingdom and Ahab its sole sovereign. Ahab! None other.

There is yet some small medicine to be harvested from that stinking thing that Pip in his lunacy did nearly free from its bonds. Until such time as Ahab’s very life is threatened with the absence of that potion, Pip shall receive a small portion of thine own, though it put thee at risk. Fedallah says it is too little, and too late for Pip, yet will I try to help him nonetheless. It must be so; for though ye could help none of the other millions so infected by thy ignorance, yet will ye strive to steal some small humanity from this for thyself, ere thou forsake all humanity that yet may lie within thy withered breast.

This line I do hereby draw, though it be invisible as that equatorial line toward which we now sail; and like that line, this girdles thy yet unquenchable goodness, vanishingly slight though it be. But lo! as easily and blithely as the equator is crossed, so might this line thou drawest be crossed with equal facility. Oh! cruel Fates, I beg of ye to absent Ahab from the making of such a sad sacrifice.

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings I so keep pushing and crowding and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?

Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, or God, or some murdering fungus, or what, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

Still does Moby Dick infectiously swim these waters. And he is close! I can feel him, just as Fedallah said he feels him, that yeasty presence in him bespeaking its kin in these human forms, even now pulling at thy very navel. He is close!

If Fedallah’s re-seeding of the zomby fails to take, we have less than a fortnight till the plague overtakes us both entire and we fall to raving, taking the entire ship with us. Moby Dick must be slain now. Now! or all is lost. Unless—O direness! O abomination!—unless Pip is also thus seeded, and from such unwilling sacrifice might the quest continue to its proper end.

Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air through the porthole smells now as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay; and sleeping there,—such sweet sleepings!—they smell not this festering rot from what once was human flesh, they see not that pulsating thing that grows again from the dark spore Fedallah hast sprinkled into that black and festering brain.

Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field.

Chapter

So Man’s Seconds Tick

[Queequeg’s coffin is laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open hatchway; the carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock.—Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip, his voice a weak entreaty, try to follow Ahab on deck.]

“Back, lad; back to bed with ye; and place that damp cloth back on thy feverish brow, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with my humor more genially than that hapless wight. Ah, lad, did I think aught would come of it, I would pray Fedallah be mistaken in his...

“—Middle aisle of a church! What’s here?”

“Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the hatchway!”

“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”

“Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”

“Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?”

“I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”

“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”

“Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.”

“Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling, monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades.”

“But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.”

“The gods again! Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?”

“Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough for that, sir; but the reason the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark to it.”

“Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in?

“Faith, sir, I’ve—“

“Faith? What’s that?”

“Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like—that’s all, sir.”

“Um, um; go on.”

“I was about to say, sir, that—“

“Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”

“He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I’ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Galápagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He’s always under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this way—come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I’m the professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”

[Ahab to himself]

“There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The grey-headed woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think on that.

But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk this over; tending to thy fever, I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!”

Chapter

The Pequod Meets Rachel

Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull.

“Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.

“Hast seen the White Whale?”

“Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”

Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod’s main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew, but no formal salutation was exchanged.

“Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!” cried Ahab, closely advancing. “How was it?”

It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while three of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat—a reserved one—had been instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat—the swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in fastening—at least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and, forced to go far to windward to first pick up her three other boats ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction—the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that final missing boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail on stunsail—after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent sailors when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.

The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.

“I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap, his watch—he’s so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks—pale in the very buttons of his eyes—look—it wasn’t the coat—it must have been the—“

“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I conjure”—here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily received his petition, all the while receiving baleful, nigh-indescernable shakings of Fedallah’s turbaned head. “For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship—I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it—if there be no other way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.”

“His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the coat and watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”

“He’s drowned with the rest on ‘em,” said the old Manx sailor standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”

The captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he allude to his missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his ancestors. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’ voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman’s career shall be unennervated by any chance display of a father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.

Meantime, now the grief-stricken captain was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.

“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a child of your old age, too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.”

“Avast!” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time I do not have to lose. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”

Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship.

Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot on the sea, however small. This way and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard she continued to tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; and all the while her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.

But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship fairly wept with spray, and yet remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her murdered children.

Chapter

From that
Vast Height

And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely there; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which, through the long arctic six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings and fears were fain to hide beneath their souls and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf, as the Esquimaux beneath his umiak hunkers in the midst of Hyperborean blizzards.

In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like zombies themselves, they all dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was unblinkingly upon them.

But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that, even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous and equally unblinking eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.

Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or inexactly lurching the planks between two undeviating limits,—the main-mast and the mizzen-mast; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,—his dead foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the days and nights were added on that he had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent Fedallah for.

He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals—breakfast and dinner: supper he never touched—nor reaped his beard; which whitely grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure, and that naked base all clustered round with corpse-pale mushrooms.

But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck, as though avoiding some calamity below; and though the Parsee’s mystic watch was as without intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary, as when Ahab desired some thing from his cabin.

Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night, both men were dumb, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.

And yet, somehow did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates—Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.

At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft,“Man the mast-heads!” And all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman’s bell, was heard—“What d’ye see?—sharp! sharp!”

But when, after meeting the children-seeking Rachel, no spout had yet been immediately seen, the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.

“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye! Ahab must have the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his large hempen basket, prepared a pin for the other end in order to fasten the rope at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, and Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, Ahab said, “Take the rope, sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles—ahead, astern, this side, and that—within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.

When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the deck. So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree—one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat; it was strange therefore, that this was the very man Ahab should select for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person’s hands.

Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his head.

But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.

“Your hat, your hat, sir!” cried the Sicilian seaman, who, being posted at the mizzen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than his level, with a deep gulf of air dividing them.

But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long hooked bill at his head. With a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.

An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.

Chapter

The Delight

The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling swells and hours went by; the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship—most miserably misnamed the Delight—was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.

Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few splintered planks of what had once been a whale-boat; now like the bleached skeleton of a horse.

“Hast seen the White Whale?”

“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.

“Hast killed him?”

“The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.

“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accurséd life!”

“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then he turned to his crew and began a brief benediction.

“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.

But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of the splash the corpse made as it struck the sea; not so quick to miss the flying bubbles that sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.

As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.

“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake. “In vain do ye strangers fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!”

Chapter

One Wee Drop

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

Hither and thither on high glided the white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.

Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at the Equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his unblinlking eyes glowing like coals that still glow hot and red in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his seared helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the fungiform canker in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one that, however willful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.

Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around him. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.

Ahab turned.

“Starbuck!”

“Sir.”

“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore.

When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-in town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow.

And then, oh and then the others, the awful plaguey whalebite and ensuing madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow with which old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—and now more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, hast old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. He is not.

Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me and with it my very life and mayhap my soul besides? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so white did never grow but from out of some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of white hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye for the mirror shows it not; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!”

“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”

“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”

“ Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! Eben’s face from in the window there! the boy’s hand waving on the hill!”

But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. “Wither dost Ahab end and the world begin? Tell me that. Thou sayest, ‘Ahab beware of Ahab,’ but I knowest not the doer; is’t that creeping thing within? I say again, is Ahab Ahab? I knowest not the answer.” Starting, he turned.

“—Starbuck! If ye but knew what Ahab dost know, then would thy heart be as one with mine, for what Ahab does must be done—for salvation’s sake— aye, not for mine alone: for the continued hale lifeblood of all humanity!”

But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away and heard him not.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.

Chapter

The Chase:
First Day

That night in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at intervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor—sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale—was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the weather-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.

The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at daybreak by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

“Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”

Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their clothes in their hands.

“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.

“Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.

“T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”

All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”

Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast so that the Indian’s head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had six months before beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him.

“I saw him almost that same instant, sir, and I cried out,” said Tashtego.

“Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first. There she blows!—there she blows!—there she blows! There again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember: stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,—quick, quicker!” and he slid through the air to the deck.

“He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet.”

“Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up! Shiver her!—shiver her!—So. Boats, boats!”

Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails set—all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.

Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling mottled hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest yeasty foam.

They saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening corpse-white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a dirgelike musical rippling accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and capered by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of screaming fowl feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of an ancient lance projected from the white whale’s back, bloodless; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.

A savage joyousness—a festering mildness of repose in swiftness invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his devilish horns; his leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not vengeful Jove himself did surpass the terrible White Whale as he swam.

On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off a stench as from the very bowels of the earth, or the vilest chthonic sludge dredged from the deepest sea. No wonder so many among the hunters who, namelessly transported and sickened by this vast festering whale, had failed to assail it; but had fatally found in his prodigious bulk the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! as of Death himself, thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.

And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand zomby god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls screamingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.

With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.

“An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed beyond the whale’s place towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell.

“The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.

In long skein, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, they wheeled round and round with joyous, expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea. But as he peered down and down into its depths, he saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying profoundly as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.

Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, transplanted himself in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.

Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s head, and reached higher than that; it seethingly writhed with thin filaments that grasped at Ahab. In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the uttermost stern.

And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its grip.

In that very instant that he touched it, slim filaments slithered seekingly over his hand. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him, the tendrils yanked from his skin where they had begun to burrow; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across.

At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of it as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.

Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down from out of the swells; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more feet out of the water—the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into the air.[1] So, in a gale, the half baffled Channel billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone Lighthouse, triumphantly to overleap its summit with their scud.

[1]This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.

But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus’s elephants in the book of Maccabees.

Meanwhile Ahab, half smothered in the foam of the whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew at the other drifting end could not succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man’s head.

Meantime, from the beginning, all this had been descried from the ship’s mast heads; squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene and was now so nigh that Ahab in the water hailed her!—“Sail on the”—but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,—“Sail on the whale!—Drive him off!”

The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.

Dragged into the bottom of Stubb’s boat, with blood-shot, blinded eyes, pupils constricted to pinpricks, the white brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.

But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts even in their pointless centres, their noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

“The harpoon,” said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one bended arm—“is it safe?”

“Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it.

“Lay it before me;—any missing men?”

“One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here are five men.”

“That’s good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!—Hands off from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail; out oars; the helm!”

It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar. The ship itself then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now? D’ye see him?” and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.

As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still greater breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man’s face there now stole some such added gloom as this.

Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly though, to evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his Captain’s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed—“The thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!”

“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.”

“Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “’tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one.”

“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives’ darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck’s antipode; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!”

The day was nearly done; only the hem of its golden robe was rustling. Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.

“Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from the air.

“How heading when last seen?”

“As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”

“Good! he will travel slower now ‘tis night. Down royals and top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he’s making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her full before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning.”—Then advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast—“Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now!—the deck is thine, sir!”

And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to see how the night wore on.

Chapter

The Chase:
Second Day

At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.

“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light to spread.

“See nothing, sir.”

“Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought;—the top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no matter—’tis but resting for the rush.”

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.

“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!”

“There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was now the mast-head cry from Cabaco, who clung there with outstretched arm.

“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on and split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!”

And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all the crew. The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked us bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of us might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all our souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which our wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things our hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of the Pequod’s sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved us to the race.

We were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held us all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one unbroken hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness; saint and sinner; all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab our one lord and keel did point to.

The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for our fate. Ah! how we still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy us!

“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. “Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears.”

It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as—much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead—Moby Dick bodily burst into view!

For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching.

Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.

“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.

“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!—stand by!”

Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting stars, slid to the deck by the isolated backstays and halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.

“Lower away,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a spare one, rigged the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine—keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!”

As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab’s boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head,—that is, pull straight up to his forehead—a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale’s sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat, the vast creature seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made. But skillfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though at times by but a plank’s breadth; while all the time, Ahab’s unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.

At last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again—hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls—when lo!—a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!

Caught and corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached within and through the tangle, past the razored steel; dragged in the line beyond, and then, twice sundering the steel’s wayward rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted, now sundered barbs of steel into the sea; and was all fast again.

That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes; the whale dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.

While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man’s line—now parting—admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires, as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom and sent it turning over and over into the air till it fell again—gunwale downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it like seals from a sea-side cave.

The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as he struck the surface—involuntarily launched him along it to a little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment, slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, a bit of plank, or the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a traveller’s methodic pace.

As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his boat’s broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day’s mishap.

But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.

“Aye, aye, Starbuck, ‘tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”

“The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up; “I put good work into that leg.”

“But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.

“Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.—But even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more me than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?—Aloft there! which way?”

“Dead to leeward, sir.”

“Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat’s crews.”

“Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”

“Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accurséd fate! that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”

“Sir?”

“My plaguey body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”

The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there.

“The Parsee!” cried Flask—“he must have been caught in—“

“The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle—find him—not gone—not gone!”

But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere to be found.

“Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your line—I thought I saw him dragging under.”

“My line! My line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon, too!—toss over the litter there,—d’ye see it?—the forged iron, men, the white whale’s—

“No, no, no,—blistered fool! this hand did dart it!—’tis in the fish!—Aloft there! Keep him nailed—Quick!—all hands to the rigging of the boats—collect the oars—harpooneers! the irons, the irons!—hoist the royals higher—a pull on all the sheets!—helm there! steady, steady for your life! I’ll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I’ll slay him yet!”

“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself!” cried Starbuck. “Never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’s name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—

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

“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man, and if ye could but grasp the truth of what transpires here in this very skull, then might thy heart be as mine, but ye cannot! for the intricate invisible threads by which Ahab is twitched to do this thing, though undeniable, they art visible only to Ahab, and ah! by Fedallah—gone, gone before, he didst say it!

“Starbuck, this whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the lieutenant of the Fates; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.

“Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ‘Tis Ahab—his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore. So it will be with Moby Dick—two days he’s floated—tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but only to spout his last! D’ye feel brave men, brave?”

“As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.

“And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he muttered on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!—The Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go before:—but still was to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s that?—There’s a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line of judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks my brain. I, I will solve it, though!”

When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.

So once more the sail was shortened, and night descended; the sound of hammers and the hum of the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight as the men toiled by lanterns in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; gazing due eastward for the earliest sun.

In the darkest hour of that long night, Ahab paces the deck in the dark on his newly crafted leg, the thump-tock, thump-tock upon the deck resounding in the aft cabin below like a clock counting down his doom; but the three harpooneers who sit round the supper table in the cabin there beneath crazed Ahab are unperturbed; see there, Tashtego, with expert flourish, puts the last rasping hone to the steel of his harpoon, then takes one of several lamps throwing a warm but fitful glow about the cabin, and moves with it to a bit of mirror and carefully begins to shave with the sharpened steel, the long barb softly rasping gainst his golden skin; Daggoo eats heartily, noisily smacking his lips as he watches, amused and jesting with Tashtego about the sparseness of the Indian’s facial hair and admonishing him to beware slitting his own throat; Queequeg sleeps in his chair in shadow, softly snoring, tattooed chin resting on his chest.

A bumping thump and a throaty groan is heard from the afterhold; Tashtego and Daggoo exchange quizzical glances and turn to the source of the noise; Queequeg bestirs himself and blearily opens his eyes. Daggoo, standing, sets down his gruel and strides to the large wall map from whence the noise arose—now a more frantic bashing, scratching sound, the map shivering visibly with every thump. Daggoo, with concerned brow—for it seems to him as if one of his shipmates must be in peril behind that door—quickly scans the map and easily discerns the trick of it; he rotates the map away, again exchanging a puzzled glance with Tashtego, then, after a moment of study, lifts the latch.

The door bursts open, knocking Daggoo back more from startlement than force, and out staggers slender Pip. Upon seeing him, Daggoo, who had great reverence for the wisdom of the mad, begins to smile in greeting when the thing that had been Pip springs slavering for his throat; behind pale Pip, another shapeless form begins to drag itself from the dark within the room, but the harpooneers do not mark it; Pip commands their full attention.

Daggoo is saved from the blessing of instant death in that moment only by his great height and Pip’s small stature, for though Pip leaps for Daggoo’s throat to tear it out and drink his life’s blood, Pip falls instead against Daggoo’s massive chest, clawing and slavering and—oh, tragedy!—Daggoo is bit by Pip who is now no longer aping a Shammy but is a zomby in truth. In swift reaction Daggoo beats the small snarling form to the planks with one mighty blow from his fist, then kicks it writhing across the small cabin, near to where Tashtego stands in open-mouthed shock, his sharpened steel still halfway to his half-shaven face.

The thing that had been Pip lands and, making no attempt to stand, grasps at Tashtego’s leg and sinks its teeth into the brave Indian’s calf. Howling, Tashtego dances back when, in a blur of motion, Queequeg, with a roaring, inarticulate cry comes flying across the cabin, his tomahawk arcing with surprising violence down on the zomby head of their former shipmate once, twice, thrice; gore spatters outward in increasing amounts with each blow; then for a frozen moment, all is still.

Within that vast stillness, like a sleek in time itself, Queequeg is yet more still; for in that timeless instant did Queequeg come to know his doom, just as Yojo foretold to him; for when his trusted tomahawk pipe had struck the third time, a drop of black ichor spattered into his open, panting mouth. He spat, but alas!, it mattered not, the damage is done.

In that moment of stillness, a heavy, dragging shuffle and a withered hiss is heard from behind. The trio spins round as one man. There, dragging itself from out the hold is a legless, rotten, stinking thing, with half its skull removed, the black brain visible within, and no small amount of brain matter missing; a pale, obscene mushroom juts out from its brow, centered there, and pulsing faintly with pale blue light.

Tashtego advances with steel raised. Queequeg says, “Spear him through him eye! Kill-ee him brain! Tash, you close mouth; close eyes!” not knowing that for the brave Wampanoag, it mattered not, for had Tashtego drunk casks of the thing’s black blood he would have been no more infected. Tash advanced, and drove his harpoon through the eye socket of the hissing, groaning creature, and so it is done, and so is the ship’s immediate disaster averted, and its certain doom assured.

All three then swore blood oaths to say nothing of this incident until the White Whale was a corpse slung alongside the Pequod.

Chapter

The Chase:
Third Day

The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the daylight look-outs who dotted every mast and almost every spar.

“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight. “In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world.”

All morning Ahab lurchingly paced the quarterdeck in furious thought, ever and anon shouting to the lookouts. “Aloft there! What d’ye see?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye, aye, it must be so. I’ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he’s chasing me now; not I, him—that’s bad; I might have known it, too. Fool! the lines—the harpoons he’s towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look outs! Man the braces!”

Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake.

“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. “God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!”

“Stand by to sway me up!” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. “We should meet him soon.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” and straightway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and once more Ahab swung on high.

A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather bow, I, Ishmael with joy and trepidation did descry the spout and sent up the shout! as, one instant later from the other mast-heads, two shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.

Ahab roared his challenge: “Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there!—brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there’s time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!—the same!—the same to Noah as to me. There’s a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere—to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms. Leeward! the White Whale goes that way; look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old mast-head!

“What’s this?—green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab’s head! There’s the difference now between man’s old age and matter’s. But aye, old mast, we both grow old together, do we not, my ship? Aye, and me minus a leg, that’s all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and I’ve known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers.

“What’s that he said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all night I’ve been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head—keep a good eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail.”

He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven blue air to the deck.

I, too, had scrambled from aloft to the deck, where Ahab, his countenance fierce, strode up to me. “Thou hast raised the white whale, sailor, and for that I thank thee. Did I not say that he who raises the white whale on the day of his death will receive this gold piece, sung full of luck? Did I not? For this, this is that whale’s final day upon this watery world, and ere the sun sinks I will have his burst heart in this very hand!” He shook his fist in my face and then, as though throttling a great urge to continue, Ahab thrust the glittering coin at me. “It is thine. Take it. Spend it not but in dire need.” Ahab impatiently shoved the coin at me again, and with no small reluctance, I received it. Then whirling about on his false leg, Ahab prepared to lower. I placed the coin in my pocket where it seemed but a dire ballast.

In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the mate,—who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck—and bade him pause.

“Starbuck!”

“Sir?”

“For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.”

“Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”

“Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!”

“Truth, sir: saddest truth.”

“Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.”

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.

“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”

“Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by the crew!”

In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.

“The sharks! the sharks!” cried Starbuck, “O Captain, my Captain, come back!”

But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on.

Yet Starbuck spake true; for scarce had Ahab pushed from the ship, when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried; they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.

“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed, to the chase; and this the critical third day?—For when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming? My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak aloud!

“—Mast-head there! See ye my boy’s hand waving on the hill?—Crazed, Starbuck, art thou crazed?—aloft there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the boats!

“Mark well the whale!—Ho! again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears the vane”—pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck—“Ha! he soars away with it!—Where’s the old man now? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder, shudder!”

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—a downward pointed arm—Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence as the waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.

“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep; the air his bulk displaced rushed over them, ruffling their hair with its foetid, rotten ancientness. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.

“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.

While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned upside down in the turns upon turns in the involutions of the lines around Moby Dick, the half torn but bloodless body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his turban fallen away to reveal that blackened hole in the midst of his brow, as if another eye there had been ripped whole from its resting place to reveal the blackened brain beneath; below that horrid wound, his distended eyes seemed turned full upon old Ahab, and as Ahab watched, aghast, one of those bulging eyes seemed to wink, even as the arm lollingly beckoned him! Was it truly so?

The harpoon dropped from Ahab’s hand.

“Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye, Parsee! I see thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die!

At this fearsome vow—to a man—Ahab’s boat’s crew stood as if to leap for the other boats. “Down, men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.—Where’s the whale? gone down again?”

But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,—which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.

“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck from the Pequod, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”

Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances.

As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail the new flag to the mast.

Whether drained by the three days’ running chase and the resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White Whale’s way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more; though indeed the whale’s last start had not been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip.

“Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on! ‘tis the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding water.”

“But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!”

“They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”—he muttered—“whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive, now—we near him. The helm! take the helm! let me pass,”—and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.

At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance—as the whale sometimes will—and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale’s spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump.

Ahab was even thus close to him such that the stench of him was a prodigious musk, as of the rotting bones of time; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into the morass of his cheesy skin, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen—who foreknew not the precise instant of the dart and were therefore unprepared for its effects—these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.

Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!

“What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him!”

Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; mayhap bethinking it a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.

Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?”

“The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen.

“Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?”

But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.

Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he.

“The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a fainting fit. Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo!, thy work.

Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!”

“Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattress that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over-salted death, though;—cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”

“Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now come to her, for the voyage is up.”

From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, vibrating in the preternatural air shoved before the vast bulk of Moby Dick, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.

“The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat; “its wood could only be American!”

Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.

“I turn my body toward the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death!

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!

“Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!”

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom close below them, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one suckingly vast vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod and all her souls out of sight.

As the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of doomed Tashtego at the mainmast—at that instant, his muscled arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

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

Epilogue

Amniotic Sea

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. —Job

The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex.

When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy breached lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side.

Buoyed up by that coffin, for three days and a night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. I soon used Little Blackie—still faithfully at my hip—to carefully burst a hole in the top of the coffin where I could extract the water and food therein, blessing Queequeg’s memory, praising his foresight while mourning him afresh.

Having faced what seemed a certain death and seen all others go down into that watery dark, and only Ishmael left living, it was as if a floodgate had been released in me, and there, floating by the grace of poor perished Queequeg, that last horrible puzzle-piece of my own past accosted me in startling detail, such that my wasted body felt not the sloshing sea, nor the hard-hammering sun, nor aught of thirst nor hunger.

That black past came roaring out from some deeper inner depth to engulf and devour me, as the Pequod’s vortex had devoured all her crew.

Zombies must still have some vestige of humanity about them, some vague memory of their past, for were it otherwise, there would not be those traits of behavior aforementioned—for what is behavior but the indelible imprint of the spirit on its flesh—traits that distinguish, say, a zomby Thoreau—preferring to wander in wilderness—to a zomby Casanova—preferring female company above all. Knowing this truth gave me some guidance as to where I might find her, my little Gennie. She was ever the Natural Philosopher, a curious and shy child; she loved the wild places over humanity’s bustle and so, choosing the least disagreeable of my duties, I first went in search of my little girl, thinking of her now as my wee Thoreau.

After long searching, circling outward from the burnt ruin of our cabin, I did finally find Gennie, alone in deep woods miles and miles away, and there in that autumn glade did I finish what I could not do before. I will not write overmuch of that horrific long moment in that clearing, standing upon the leafy autumn carpet, bright as fire against the gray day, for that deed will ever unman me. The doing of it, and the reliving of it as I floated there in vast Pacific solitude is as much as one can bear and yet retain his wits; I will not speak of it further, as there is more and worse yet to tell.

Finally, dejected and near destroyed with grief from that dastardly task, I set off for the ancient maple leaning over the stream, and under it, the moss-covered cairn of heavy river boulders and upon arriving, stood a long, long time there looking into that burbling current as a gentle rain fell. It had taken all the strength I could muster to refrain from obtaining some small dose of laudanum to numb me for this duty, but I had persevered, and allowed myself only the potent flask of moonshine gifted me by my Militia band upon my departure. Taking the cork between my teeth, I unstoppered the flask, took a long and fiery pull and then stood a while in the drizzle, staring at the rusted spade there against the rain-glistening bark of the maple where I had left it leaning.

The grave itself seemed much as before: heavy river stones mounded and mouldering there on the grave without a headstone. I was much weaker then, not having had anything like regular nourishment in the Militia; the haleness I had enjoyed prior to the Plague had come from hewing logs and large hearty meals cooked by Lilith; my former health was but a fragment of memory when I returned to that lone tree above the brook. Stones that took me but an hour to move on that day long past, now required near a full day to move. My reluctance to continue was no small hindrance to the task’s completion.

Moss had grown among the stones of Lilith’s cairn, the new life amongst the graveyard stones giving me no solace. Beyond the mounded boulders the river chuckled along, oblivious as the gods to this human woe, that woe seeming to serve as entertainment, rather than any source of pathos.

On the third day all the stones had been rolled from the hole. The grave-turned earth had settled deeper into the cavity, but was still loose, and easily removed. As I dug deeper, it was as though I began to unbury some sunken grief from my inmost heart. The sweat dripping from my face was soon joined by the tears that came springing forth, intermixing with the bitter sweat, falling as the rain upon that twice-turned earth.

Sooner than I liked, the spade rapped hollowly against the coffin lid, and where all before had been silent but for the chunk of the spade, the burble of the brook, and the patter of rain dripping from the maple, now a feeble scratching and a faint hiss could be heard from within the dirty pine box. I paused and tipped the flask up, took a long draught, feeling a trail of fire burning from lip to belly. Over the pungent smell of the liquor lingered the smell of fall rain and the sour smell of rotting leaves, and lurking below that melancholy savor, there squirmed up from the ground a pestilential stench I well knew. I steeled my resolve, tipped the flask to my lips again, emptying it, threw it aside; and then, after another long pause, pried up the coffin lid.

In that gray landscape, spattered with the fire of dead and falling foliage from the maple tree, Lilith’s own fiery hair shone forth from that pit, radiant and beautiful, or so it still seemed to me. The zomby that had once been Lil however, held no such charm. The upper torso, in its struggle to crawl from out the grave had long ago pulled free of its lower half, which lay shrunken and shriveled at the coffin’s foot; the spine jutted from the wreck of her ribs, dangling there to wriggle like some filthy worm; from two years of scrabbling at the coffin lid, its fingers were ragged stumps, pale fingerbones protruding like some rude gesture. It was too weak, and too long underground and undernourished to put up anything like a fight, and so I stood there—I know not how long—and gazed at the monster. After some time, a sensation as of numbness washed through me. This putrid thing was not my Lilith; it had become other, had now in truth become a thing, and with no more emotion than that I had held for any other zomby I had slain—or so I choose to believe—with the spade I then crushed its skull, and staggered off, drunk and reeling, soon to go a-whaling.

After some time, I was, once more, Ishmael-upon-the-sea, now in possession of those vile yet precious memories. Stranded there, floating nigh Queequeg’s coffin and with all hope now withered within my breast, I wept and screamed and raged at the world and my sorry place in it. For all that second day afloat, and all through the long night following, the tears for all my dead—and aye, for all creation—fell to vanish, absorbed and diluted, into the amniotic sea.

On the morn of the third day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

In the weeks following, once somewhat recovered, I fully opened poor Queequeg’s carved coffin (how I missed his tattooed face and all those companionable smokes we shared). I started in shock. My dear friend had somehow managed to insert enigmatic Yojo within. Mustering my courage to quell no small sense of trepidation, I carefully greeted the little god and put him gingerly in my pocket. Imagine my surprise and melancholy delight when, lifting Yojo from the coffin, I found that to him was tied Queequeg’s smaller tobacco wallet. Choking back a sob, I promptly loaded a pipe and, smoking in Queequeg’s honor, emptied the rest of the coffin.

You will recall, when Queequeg decided not to die, he had spent his time laboriously copying the hieroglyphics of his tattoos into the coffin, and mayhap more than was written on his skin, for the coffin’s interior was near fully covered with the strange marks. I remembered he had told me this tattooing was the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who had written out a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth. Perhaps Yojo would break his silence and help me translate it, though at that thought, a shiver ran through me, for I then remembered the dream. I hoped the little idol would maintain his silence as I nervously fingered the heavy golden coin in my trowser pocket.

Even more astonishing however, I found, wrapped tightly in oilcloth, three sharkskin bound books, each thick as a bible, with leaves as thin; these books, to my eternal astonishment, chanced to be the logbooks of the Pequod, put down in Ahab’s spidery hand! The first two, more weathered-looking, were full to bursting, jammed to the margins with close writing; the other was two thirds filled by Ahab’s hand; the words seemed possessed of a frenetic, febrile quality, as though written by one with a driven palsy. Then, several blank pages after Ahab’s last entry—dated some days before doom found him, and thereby found us all—another hand begins to write in a language I do not know nor have ever seen before. Page upon page upon page of it.

The language has a Persian look to it, with graceful loops, peppered with diacritics, seeming to move from starboard to larboard across the page; a very different, strong, confident hand from Ahab’s, one conveying a feeling of strength, and even protection, though I could read not one character; it is a queer sensation that sets my skin to tingling. It can only be Fedallah who penned this. I perused many pages of his curving loopy, backwards-running words, but despite much staring, they kept their meaning hid.

The final entry appears scribbled—by all appearances in some great haste—what looks for all the world as a chef’s recipe, though I ween ‘tis not for tabbouleh, nor some exotic curry. After the supposed recipe are more paragraphs writ backwards in that same hand, more looped than the whale line that wrapt round Ahab’s neck. Upon first opening this section of the log, a small packet of folded paper was revealed, and within was an exceedingly fine pale bluish powder, finer than the finest talcum that, at the faintest breath of breeze would have been irretrievably dispersed, as unrecoverable as ashes belched from a crematorium. I carefully re-sealed the packet and stowed it safely away.

During the long listless days of my recovery, and for many months afterward, I pored over these log books, reading again and again the mad ravings of the tortured spirit of Ahab. There was a time of unholy rage against him, a rage that threatened to devour me and, had he stood before me during that passion, zomby or still fully human, I would have struck him stone dead with no hesitation; for by his actions, however unintended, he had stript from me all I held most precious in the world; and forced upon me, and many others besides, heinous acts none should ever have need to commit.

But upon more reading and much pondering over the months, my rage began to diminish, slow as the progression of the equinox. Aye, as the tight fist of my rage relaxed somewhat, it then gave way to awe, then reverence, then—what’s this?—something akin to worship? Perhaps; for who among us has the stones to bear such a curse, and yet still dare take up arms against it as Ahab did, however hopeless the fight; however unregarded and unremembered the struggle? Who among us can take up the gauntlet thrown down by a veritable zomby god and, roaring acceptance of the duel, fling it violently back? This is more than most men could ever do; and of those that could do it, fewer still are they whom circumstances thrust unrehearsed upon that final stage.

Ahab still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; I must not conceal that all his outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! And yet! And yet what courage he showed in his darkest hour! Even in failure does Ahab’s stature loom large in thy mind! and even in death does his power thump here, here! in thine own breast, Ishmael. And so, I who bethought myself forever gone from the fight, have been sucked to deeper, more dangerously infested waters than those from which I fled. This dire knowledge acts upon me like that final self-devouring vortex the Pequod created as she plummeted silently into the crushing dark with all her crew save me; it pulls me inexorably into its mysterious, swirling maw.

Already have I begun to query ships the Rachel meets on her way back round the Cape to inquire if any can read this looping scribble; one man I did find off Madagascar, aboard The Dromedary, an old salt who spoke the Parsee’s tongue but could not read it overmuch; those words Fedallah wrote seemed to him to be written in some ancient and therefore unrecognizable form.

Also have I queried the many South Seas Islanders who so abound in the fishery regarding Queequeg’s mysterious carvings, which I have begun to copy into the blank pages remaining in the Pequod’s final log. Others there must be who can read these tongues, each from opposite sides of the globe.

I now pitied Ahab; but as to pity for Moby Dick, there was none in my breast nor any other part of my being. For all the White Whale’s old age, and his fierceness, and his horrible pestilence, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to insure the future merry-makings of men, women, and children the globe over; and also in order to validate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all; and if for nothing else, then must the White Whale die for Lilith’s sake, and for Gennie’s; and for all those Liliths and Gennies yet in the world. I will come for thee, Moby Dick, thou festering whale.

Avast, Ishmael, for this named whale requires renaming.

Henceforth will ye be known as Zomby Dick.

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