﻿ 

 MOBY DICK; 

or, THE WHALE. 

By Herman Melville 

 

CHAPTER 1. Loomings.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never 
mind how long precisely—having little 
or no money in my purse, and nothing 
particular to interest me on shore, I 
thought I would sail about a little and 
see the watery part of the world. It is 
a way I have of driving off the spleen 
and regulating the circulation. 
Whenever I find myself growing grim 
about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, 
drizzly November in my soul; whenever I 
find myself involuntarily pausing 
before coffin warehouses, and bringing 
up the rear of every funeral I meet; 
and especially whenever my hypos get 
such an upper hand of me, that it 
requires a strong moral principle to 
prevent me from deliberately stepping 
into the street, and methodically 
knocking people’s hats off—then, I 
account it high time to get to sea as 
soon as I can. This is my substitute 
for pistol and ball. With a 
philosophical flourish Cato throws 
himself upon his sword; I quietly take 
to the ship. There is nothing 
surprising in this. If they but knew 
it, almost all men in their degree, 
some time or other, cherish very nearly 
the same feelings towards the ocean 
with me.

There now is your insular city of the 
Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as 
Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce 
surrounds it with her surf. Right and 
left, the streets take you waterward. 
Its extreme 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 the city of a dreamy 
Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears 
Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, 
by Whitehall, northward. What do you 
see?—Posted like silent sentinels all 
around the town, stand thousands upon 
thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean 
reveries. Some leaning against the 
spiles; some seated upon the 
pier-heads; some looking over the 
bulwarks of ships from China; some high 
aloft in the rigging, as if striving to 
get a still better seaward peep. But 
these are all landsmen; of week days 
pent up in lath and plaster—tied to 
counters, nailed to benches, clinched 
to desks. How then is this? Are the 
green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing 
straight for the water, and seemingly 
bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will 
content them but the extremest limit of 
the land; loitering under the shady lee 
of yonder warehouses will not suffice. 
No. They must get just as nigh the 
water as they possibly can without 
falling in. And there they stand—miles 
of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they 
come from lanes and alleys, streets and 
avenues—north, east, south, and west. 
Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does 
the magnetic virtue of the needles of 
the compasses of all those ships 
attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; 
in some high land of lakes. Take almost 
any path you please, and ten to one it 
carries you down in a dale, and leaves 
you there by a pool in the stream. 
There is magic in it. Let the most 
absent-minded of men be plunged in his 
deepest reveries—stand that man on his 
legs, set his feet a-going, and he will 
infallibly lead you to water, if water 
there be in all that region. Should you 
ever be athirst in the great American 
desert, try this experiment, if your 
caravan happen to be supplied with a 
metaphysical professor. Yes, as every 
one knows, meditation and water are 
wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to 
paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, 
quietest, most enchanting bit of 
romantic landscape in all the valley of 
the Saco. What is the chief element he 
employs? There stand his trees, each 
with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and 
a crucifix were within; and here sleeps 
his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; 
and up from yonder cottage goes a 
sleepy smoke. Deep into distant 
woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to 
overlapping spurs of mountains bathed 
in their hill-side blue. But though the 
picture lies thus tranced, and though 
this pine-tree shakes down its sighs 
like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, 
yet all were vain, unless the 
shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the 
magic stream before him. Go visit the 
Prairies in June, when for scores on 
scores of miles you wade knee-deep 
among Tiger-lilies—what is the one 
charm wanting?—Water—there is not a 
drop of water there! Were Niagara but a 
cataract of sand, would you travel your 
thousand miles to see it? Why did the 
poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly 
receiving two handfuls of silver, 
deliberate whether to buy him a coat, 
which he sadly needed, or invest his 
money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway 
Beach? Why is almost every robust 
healthy boy with a robust healthy soul 
in him, at some time or other crazy to 
go to sea? Why upon your first voyage 
as a passenger, did you yourself feel 
such a mystical vibration, when first 
told that you and your ship were now 
out of sight of land? Why did the old 
Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the 
Greeks give it a separate deity, and 
own brother of Jove? Surely all this is 
not without meaning. And still deeper 
the meaning of that story of Narcissus, 
who because he could not grasp the 
tormenting, mild image he saw in the 
fountain, plunged into it and was 
drowned. But that same image, we 
ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. 
It is the image of the ungraspable 
phantom of life; and this is the key to 
it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit 
of going to sea whenever I begin to 
grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to 
be over conscious of my lungs, I do not 
mean to have it inferred that I ever go 
to sea as a passenger. For to go as a 
passenger you must needs have a purse, 
and a purse is but a rag unless you 
have something in it. Besides, 
passengers get sea-sick—grow 
quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do 
not enjoy themselves much, as a general 
thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; 
nor, though I am something of a salt, 
do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or 
a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the 
glory and distinction of such offices 
to those who like them. For my part, I 
abominate all 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, particularly if you come of an 
old established family in the land, the 
Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or 
Hardicanutes. And more than all, if 
just previous to putting your hand into 
the tar-pot, you have been lording it 
as a country schoolmaster, making the 
tallest boys stand in awe of you. The 
transition is a keen one, I assure you, 
from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and 
requires a strong decoction of Seneca 
and the Stoics to enable you to grin 
and bear it. But even this wears off in 
time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a 
sea-captain orders me to get a broom 
and sweep down the decks? What does 
that indignity amount to, weighed, I 
mean, in the scales of the New 
Testament? Do you think the archangel 
Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, 
because I promptly and respectfully 
obey that old hunks in that particular 
instance? Who 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 about, I 
have the satisfaction of knowing that 
it is all right; that everybody else is 
one way or other served in much the 
same way—either in a physical or 
metaphysical point of view, that is; 
and so the universal thump is passed 
round, and all hands should rub each 
other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, 
because they make a point of paying me 
for my trouble, whereas they never pay 
passengers a single penny that I ever 
heard of. On the contrary, passengers 
themselves must pay. And there is all 
the difference in the world between 
paying and being paid. The act of 
paying is perhaps the most 
uncomfortable infliction that the two 
orchard thieves entailed upon us. But 
being paid,—what will compare with it? 
The urbane activity with which a man 
receives money is really marvellous, 
considering that we so earnestly 
believe money to be the root of all 
earthly ills, and that on no account 
can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how 
cheerfully we consign ourselves to 
perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a 
sailor, because of the wholesome 
exercise and pure air of the 
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), 
so for the most part the Commodore on 
the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at 
second hand from the sailors on the 
forecastle. He thinks he breathes it 
first; but not so. In much the same way 
do the commonalty lead their leaders in 
many other things, at the same time 
that the leaders little suspect it. But 
wherefore it was that after having 
repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant 
sailor, I should now take it into my 
head to go on a whaling voyage; this 
the invisible police officer of the 
Fates, who has the constant 
surveillance of me, and secretly dogs 
me, and influences me in some 
unaccountable way—he can better answer 
than any one else. And, doubtless, my 
going on this whaling voyage, formed 
part of the grand programme of 
Providence that was drawn up a long 
time ago. It came in as a sort of brief 
interlude and solo between more 
extensive performances. I take it that 
this part of the bill must have run 
something like this:

“Grand Contested Election for the 
Presidency of the United States. 
“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY 
BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly 
that those stage managers, the Fates, 
put me down for this shabby part of a 
whaling voyage, when others were set 
down for magnificent parts in high 
tragedies, and short and easy parts in 
genteel comedies, and jolly parts in 
farces—though I cannot tell why this 
was exactly; yet, now that I recall all 
the circumstances, I think I can see a 
little into the springs and motives 
which being cunningly presented to me 
under various disguises, induced me to 
set about performing the part I did, 
besides cajoling me into the delusion 
that it was a choice resulting from my 
own unbiased freewill and 
discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the 
overwhelming idea of the great whale 
himself. Such a portentous and 
mysterious monster roused all my 
curiosity. Then the wild and distant 
seas where he rolled his island bulk; 
the undeliverable, nameless perils of 
the whale; these, with all the 
attending marvels of a thousand 
Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to 
sway me to my wish. With other men, 
perhaps, such things would not have 
been inducements; but as for me, I am 
tormented with an everlasting itch for 
things remote. I love to sail forbidden 
seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not 
ignoring what is good, I am quick to 
perceive a horror, and could still be 
social with it—would they let me—since 
it is but well to be on friendly terms 
with all the inmates of the place one 
lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the 
whaling voyage was welcome; the great 
flood-gates of the wonder-world swung 
open, and in the wild conceits that 
swayed me to my purpose, two and two 
there floated into my inmost soul, 
endless processions of the whale, and, 
mid most of them all, one grand hooded 
phantom, like a snow hill in the air. 

 

CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old 
carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and 
started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. 
Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, 
I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a 
Saturday night in December. Much was I 
disappointed upon learning that the 
little packet for Nantucket had already 
sailed, and that no way of reaching 
that place would offer, till the 
following Monday.

As most young candidates for the pains 
and penalties of whaling stop at this 
same New Bedford, thence to embark on 
their voyage, it may as well be related 
that I, for one, had no idea of so 
doing. For my mind was made up to sail 
in no other than a Nantucket craft, 
because there was a fine, boisterous 
something about everything connected 
with that famous old island, which 
amazingly pleased me. Besides though 
New Bedford has of late been gradually 
monopolising the business of whaling, 
and though in this matter poor old 
Nantucket is now much behind her, yet 
Nantucket was her great original—the 
Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where 
the first dead American whale was 
stranded. Where else but from Nantucket 
did those aboriginal whalemen, the 
Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to 
give chase to the Leviathan? And where 
but from Nantucket, too, did that first 
adventurous little sloop put forth, 
partly laden with imported 
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. I knew no one in the place. 
With anxious grapnels I had sounded my 
pocket, and only brought up a few 
pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, 
Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood 
in the middle of a dreary street 
shouldering my bag, and comparing the 
gloom towards the north with the 
darkness towards the south—wherever in 
your wisdom you may conclude to lodge 
for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure 
to inquire the price, and don’t be too 
particular.

With halting steps I paced the streets, 
and passed the sign of “The Crossed 
Harpoons”—but it looked too expensive 
and jolly there. Further on, from the 
bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish 
Inn,” there came such fervent rays, 
that it seemed to have melted the 
packed snow and ice from before the 
house, for everywhere else the 
congealed frost lay ten inches thick in 
a hard, asphaltic pavement,—rather 
weary for me, when I struck my foot 
against the flinty projections, because 
from hard, remorseless service the 
soles of my boots were in a most 
miserable plight. Too expensive and 
jolly, again thought I, pausing one 
moment to watch the broad glare in the 
street, and hear the sounds of the 
tinkling glasses within. But go on, 
Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you 
hear? get away from before the door; 
your patched boots are stopping the 
way. So on I went. I now by instinct 
followed the streets that took me 
waterward, for there, doubtless, were 
the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary streets! blocks of 
blackness, not houses, on either hand, 
and here and there a candle, like a 
candle moving about in a tomb. At this 
hour of the night, of the last day of 
the week, that quarter of the town 
proved all but deserted. But presently 
I came to a smoky light proceeding from 
a low, wide building, the door of which 
stood invitingly open. It had a 
careless look, as if it were meant for 
the uses of the public; so, entering, 
the first thing I did was to stumble 
over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! 
thought I, ha, as the flying particles 
almost choked me, are these ashes from 
that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But “The 
Crossed Harpoons,” and “The 
Sword-Fish?”—this, then must needs be 
the sign of “The Trap.” However, I 
picked myself up and hearing a loud 
voice within, pushed on and opened a 
second, interior door.

It seemed the great Black Parliament 
sitting in Tophet. A hundred black 
faces turned round in their rows to 
peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom 
was beating a book in a pulpit. It was 
a negro church; and the preacher’s text 
was about the blackness of darkness, 
and the weeping and wailing and 
teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, 
muttered I, backing out, Wretched 
entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort 
of light not far from the docks, and 
heard a forlorn creaking in the air; 
and looking up, saw a swinging sign 
over the door with a white painting 
upon it, faintly representing a tall 
straight jet of misty spray, and these 
words underneath—“The Spouter 
Inn:—Peter Coffin.”

Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that 
particular connexion, thought I. But it 
is a common name in Nantucket, they 
say, and I suppose this Peter here is 
an emigrant from there. As the light 
looked so dim, and the place, for the 
time, looked quiet enough, and the 
dilapidated little wooden house itself 
looked as if it might have been carted 
here from the ruins of some burnt 
district, and as the swinging sign had 
a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, 
I thought that here was the very spot 
for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea 
coffee.

It was a queer sort of place—a 
gable-ended old house, one side palsied 
as it were, and leaning over sadly. It 
stood on a sharp bleak corner, where 
that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept 
up a worse howling than ever it did 
about poor Paul’s tossed craft. 
Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty 
pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, 
with his feet on the hob quietly 
toasting for bed. “In judging of that 
tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” 
says an old writer—of whose works I 
possess the only copy extant—“it maketh 
a marvellous difference, whether thou 
lookest out at it from a glass window 
where the frost is all on the outside, 
or whether thou observest it from that 
sashless window, where the frost is on 
both sides, and of which the wight 
Death is the only glazier.” True 
enough, thought I, as this passage 
occurred to my mind—old black-letter, 
thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes 
are windows, and this body of mine is 
the house. What a pity they didn’t stop 
up the chinks and the crannies though, 
and thrust in a little lint here and 
there. But it’s too late to make any 
improvements now. The universe is 
finished; the copestone is on, and the 
chips were carted off a million years 
ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his 
teeth against the curbstone for his 
pillow, and shaking off his tatters 
with his shiverings, he might plug up 
both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob 
into his mouth, and yet that would not 
keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. 
Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red 
silken wrapper—(he had a redder one 
afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine 
frosty night; how Orion glitters; what 
northern lights! Let them talk of their 
oriental summer climes of everlasting 
conservatories; give me the privilege 
of making my own summer with my own 
coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm 
his blue hands by holding them up to 
the grand northern lights? Would not 
Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? 
Would he not far rather lay him down 
lengthwise along the line of the 
equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the 
fiery pit itself, in order to keep out 
this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded 
there on the curbstone before the door 
of Dives, this is more wonderful than 
that an iceberg should be moored to one 
of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he 
too lives like a Czar in an ice palace 
made of frozen sighs, and being a 
president of a temperance society, he 
only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

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. The Spouter-Inn.

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, 
you found yourself in a wide, low, 
straggling entry with old-fashioned 
wainscots, reminding one of the 
bulwarks of some condemned old craft. 
On one side hung a very large 
oilpainting 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 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 aged persons with whom I conversed 
upon the subject. The picture 
represents a Cape-Horner in a great 
hurricane; the half-foundered ship 
weltering there with its three 
dismantled masts alone visible; and an 
exasperated whale, purposing to spring 
clean over the craft, is in the 
enormous act of impaling himself upon 
the three mast-heads.

The opposite wall of this entry was 
hung all over with a heathenish array 
of monstrous clubs and spears. Some 
were thickly set with glittering teeth 
resembling ivory saws; others were 
tufted with knots of human hair; and 
one was sickle-shaped, with a vast 
handle sweeping round like the segment 
made in the new-mown grass by a 
long-armed mower. You shuddered as you 
gazed, and wondered what monstrous 
cannibal and savage could ever have 
gone a death-harvesting with such a 
hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed 
with these were rusty old whaling 
lances and harpoons all broken and 
deformed. Some were storied weapons. 
With this once long lance, now wildly 
elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan 
Swain kill fifteen whales between a 
sunrise and a sunset. And that 
harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was 
flung in Javan seas, and run away with 
by a whale, years 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 imbedded in the 
hump.

Crossing this dusky entry, and on 
through yon low-arched way—cut through 
what in old times must have been a 
great central chimney with fireplaces 
all round—you enter the public room. A 
still duskier place is this, with such 
low ponderous beams above, and such old 
wrinkled planks beneath, that you would 
almost fancy you trod some old craft’s 
cockpits, especially of such a howling 
night, when this corner-anchored old 
ark rocked so furiously. On one side 
stood a long, low, shelf-like table 
covered with cracked glass cases, 
filled with dusty rarities gathered 
from this wide world’s remotest nooks. 
Projecting from the further angle of 
the room stands a dark-looking den—the 
bar—a rude attempt at a right whale’s 
head. Be that how it may, there stands 
the vast arched bone of the whale’s 
jaw, so wide, a coach might almost 
drive beneath it. Within are shabby 
shelves, ranged round with old 
decanters, bottles, flasks; and in 
those jaws of swift destruction, like 
another cursed Jonah (by which name 
indeed they called him), bustles a 
little withered old man, who, for their 
money, dearly sells the sailors 
deliriums and death.

Abominable are the tumblers into which 
he pours his poison. Though true 
cylinders without—within, the villanous 
green goggling glasses deceitfully 
tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. 
Parallel meridians rudely pecked into 
the glass, surround these footpads’ 
goblets. Fill to this mark, and your 
charge is but a penny; to this a penny 
more; and so on to the full glass—the 
Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp 
down for a shilling.

Upon entering the place I found a 
number of young seamen gathered about a 
table, examining by a dim light divers 
specimens of skrimshander. I sought the 
landlord, and telling him I desired to 
be accommodated with a room, received 
for answer that his house was full—not 
a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he 
added, tapping his forehead, “you haint 
no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s 
blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are 
goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get 
used to that sort of thing.”

I told him that I never liked to sleep 
two in a bed; that if I should ever do 
so, it would depend upon who the 
harpooneer might be, and that if he 
(the landlord) really had no other 
place for me, and the harpooneer was 
not decidedly objectionable, why rather 
than wander further about a strange 
town on so bitter a night, I would put 
up with the half of any decent man’s 
blanket.

“I thought so. All right; take a seat. 
Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be 
ready directly.”

I sat down on an old wooden settle, 
carved all over like a bench on the 
Battery. At one end a ruminating tar 
was still further adorning it with his 
jack-knife, stooping over and 
diligently working away at the space 
between his legs. He was trying his 
hand at a ship under full sail, but he 
didn’t make much headway, I thought.

At last some four or five of us were 
summoned to our meal in an adjoining 
room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at 
all—the landlord said he couldn’t 
afford it. Nothing but two dismal 
tallow candles, each in a winding 
sheet. We were fain to button up our 
monkey jackets, and hold to our lips 
cups of scalding tea with our half 
frozen fingers. But the fare was of the 
most substantial kind—not only meat and 
potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! 
dumplings for supper! One young fellow 
in a green box coat, addressed himself 
to these dumplings in a most direful 
manner.

“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll 
have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”

“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the 
harpooneer is it?”

“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of 
diabolically funny, “the harpooneer is 
a dark complexioned chap. He never eats 
dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but 
steaks, and 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. Starting up, the landlord 
cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I 
seed her reported in the offing this 
morning; a three years’ voyage, and a 
full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have 
the latest news from the Feegees.”

A tramping of sea boots was heard in 
the entry; the door was flung open, and 
in rolled a wild set of mariners 
enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch 
coats, and with their heads muffled in 
woollen comforters, all bedarned and 
ragged, and their beards stiff with 
icicles, they seemed an eruption of 
bears from Labrador. They had just 
landed from their boat, and this was 
the first house they entered. No 
wonder, then, that they made a straight 
wake for the whale’s mouth—the bar—when 
the wrinkled little old Jonah, there 
officiating, soon poured them out 
brimmers all round. One complained of a 
bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah 
mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin 
and molasses, which he swore was a 
sovereign cure for all colds and 
catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how 
long standing, or whether caught off 
the coast of Labrador, or on the 
weather side of an ice-island.

The liquor soon mounted into their 
heads, as it generally does even with 
the arrantest topers newly landed from 
sea, and they began capering about most 
obstreperously.

I observed, however, that one of them 
held somewhat aloof, and though he 
seemed desirous not to spoil the 
hilarity of his shipmates by his own 
sober face, yet upon the whole he 
refrained from making as much noise as 
the rest. This man interested me at 
once; and since the sea-gods had 
ordained that he should soon become my 
shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner 
one, so far as this narrative is 
concerned), I will here venture upon a 
little description of him. He stood 
full six feet in height, with noble 
shoulders, and a chest like a 
coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such 
brawn in a man. His face was deeply 
brown and burnt, making his white teeth 
dazzling by the contrast; while in the 
deep shadows of his eyes floated some 
reminiscences that did not seem to give 
him much joy. His voice at once 
announced that he was a Southerner, and 
from his fine stature, I thought he 
must be one of those tall mountaineers 
from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. 
When the revelry of his companions had 
mounted to its height, this man slipped 
away unobserved, and I saw no more of 
him till he became my comrade on the 
sea. In a few minutes, however, he was 
missed by his shipmates, and being, it 
seems, for some reason a huge 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 my decent 
harpooneer ought to be home and going 
bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble 
in upon me at midnight—how could I tell 
from what vile hole he had been coming?

“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about 
that harpooneer.—I shan’t sleep with 
him. I’ll try the bench here.”

“Just as you please; I’m sorry I can’t 
spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, 
and it’s a plaguy rough board 
here”—feeling of the knots and notches. 
“But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got 
a carpenter’s plane there in the 
bar—wait, I say, and I’ll make ye snug 
enough.” So saying he procured the 
plane; and with his old silk 
handkerchief first dusting the bench, 
vigorously set to planing away at my 
bed, the while grinning like an ape. 
The shavings flew right and left; till 
at last the plane-iron came bump 
against an indestructible knot. The 
landlord was near spraining his wrist, 
and I told him for heaven’s sake to 
quit—the bed was soft enough to suit 
me, and I did not know how all the 
planing in the world could make eider 
down of a pine plank. So gathering up 
the shavings with another grin, and 
throwing them into the great stove in 
the middle of the room, he went about 
his business, and left me in a brown 
study.

I now took the measure of the bench, 
and found that it was a foot too short; 
but that could be mended with a chair. 
But it was a foot too narrow, and the 
other bench in the room was about four 
inches higher than the planed one—so 
there was no yoking them. I then placed 
the first bench lengthwise along the 
only clear space against the wall, 
leaving a little interval between, for 
my back to settle down in. But I soon 
found that there came such a draught of 
cold air over me from under the sill of 
the window, that this plan would never 
do at all, especially as another 
current from the rickety door met the 
one from the window, and both together 
formed a series of small whirlwinds in 
the immediate vicinity of the spot 
where I had thought to spend the night.

The devil fetch that harpooneer, 
thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a 
march on him—bolt his door inside, and 
jump into his bed, not to be wakened by 
the most violent knockings? It seemed 
no bad idea; but upon second thoughts I 
dismissed it. For who could tell but 
what the next morning, so soon as I 
popped out of the room, the harpooneer 
might be standing in the entry, all 
ready to knock me down!

Still, looking 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 early bird—airley to 
bed and airley to rise—yes, he’s the 
bird what catches the worm. But 
to-night he went out a peddling, you 
see, and I don’t see what on airth 
keeps him so late, unless, may be, he 
can’t sell his head.”

“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a 
bamboozingly story is this you are 
telling me?” getting into a towering 
rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, 
that this harpooneer is actually 
engaged this blessed Saturday night, or 
rather Sunday morning, in peddling his 
head around this town?”

“That’s precisely it,” said the 
landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t 
sell it here, the market’s overstocked.”

“With what?” shouted I.

“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too 
many heads in the world?”

“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said 
I quite calmly, “you’d better stop 
spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”

“May be not,” taking out a stick and 
whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther 
guess you’ll be done brown if that ere 
harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his 
head.”

“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now 
flying into a passion again at this 
unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.

“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.

“Broke,” said I—“broke, do you mean?”

“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he 
can’t sell it, I guess.”

“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as 
cool as Mt. Hecla in a 
snow-storm—“landlord, stop whittling. 
You and I must understand one another, 
and that too without delay. I come to 
your house and want a bed; you tell me 
you can only give me half a one; that 
the other half belongs to a certain 
harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, 
whom I have not yet seen, you persist 
in telling me the most mystifying and 
exasperating stories tending to beget 
in me an uncomfortable feeling towards 
the man whom you design for my 
bedfellow—a sort of connexion, 
landlord, which is an intimate and 
confidential one in the highest degree. 
I now demand of you to speak out and 
tell me who and what this harpooneer 
is, and whether I shall be in all 
respects safe to spend the night with 
him. And in the first place, you will 
be so good as to unsay that story about 
selling his head, which if true I take 
to be good evidence that this 
harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no 
idea of sleeping with a madman; and 
you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, 
sir, by trying to induce me to do so 
knowingly, would thereby render 
yourself liable to a criminal 
prosecution.”

“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a 
long breath, “that’s a purty long 
sarmon for a chap that rips a little 
now and then. But be easy, be easy, 
this here harpooneer I have been 
tellin’ you of has just arrived from 
the south seas, where he bought up a 
lot of ‘balmed New Zealand heads (great 
curios, you know), and he’s sold all on 
‘em but one, and that one he’s trying 
to sell to-night, cause to-morrow’s 
Sunday, and it would not do to be 
sellin’ human heads about the streets 
when folks is goin’ to churches. He 
wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped 
him just as he was goin’ out of the 
door with four heads strung on a 
string, for all the airth like a string 
of inions.”

This account cleared up the otherwise 
unaccountable mystery, and showed that 
the landlord, after all, had had no 
idea of fooling me—but at the same time 
what could I think of a harpooneer who 
stayed out 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 were 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. Arter 
that, Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come 
along here, I’ll give ye a glim in a 
jiffy;” and so saying he lighted a 
candle and held it towards me, offering 
to lead the way. But I stood 
irresolute; when looking at a clock in 
the corner, he exclaimed “I vum it’s 
Sunday—you won’t see that harpooneer 
to-night; he’s come to anchor 
somewhere—come along then; do come; 
won’t ye come?”

I considered the matter a moment, and 
then up stairs we went, and I was 
ushered into a small room, cold as a 
clam, and furnished, sure enough, with 
a prodigious bed, almost big enough 
indeed for any four harpooneers to 
sleep abreast.

“There,” said the landlord, placing the 
candle on a crazy old sea chest that 
did double duty as a wash-stand and 
centre table; “there, make yourself 
comfortable now, and good night to ye.” 
I turned round from eyeing the bed, but 
he had disappeared.

Folding back the counterpane, I stooped 
over the bed. Though none of the most 
elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny 
tolerably well. I then glanced round 
the room; and besides the bedstead and 
centre table, could see no other 
furniture belonging to the place, but a 
rude shelf, the four walls, and a 
papered fireboard representing a man 
striking a whale. Of things not 
properly belonging to the room, there 
was a hammock lashed up, and thrown 
upon the floor in one corner; also a 
large seaman’s bag, containing the 
harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu 
of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a 
parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on 
the shelf over the fire-place, and a 
tall harpoon standing at the head of 
the bed.

But what is this on the chest? I took 
it up, and held it close to the light, 
and felt it, and smelt it, and tried 
every way possible to arrive at some 
satisfactory conclusion concerning it. 
I can compare it to nothing but a large 
door mat, ornamented at the edges with 
little tinkling tags something like the 
stained porcupine quills round an 
Indian moccasin. There was a hole or 
slit in the middle of this mat, as you 
see the same in South American ponchos. 
But could it be possible that any sober 
harpooneer would get into a door mat, 
and parade the streets of any Christian 
town in that sort of guise? I put it 
on, to try it, and it weighed me down 
like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy 
and thick, and I thought a little damp, 
as though this mysterious harpooneer 
had been wearing it of a rainy day. I 
went up in it to a bit of glass stuck 
against the wall, and I never saw such 
a sight in my life. I tore myself out 
of it in such a hurry that I gave 
myself a kink in the neck.

I sat down on the side of the bed, and 
commenced thinking about this 
head-peddling harpooneer, and his door 
mat. After thinking some time on the 
bed-side, I got up and took off my 
monkey jacket, and then stood in the 
middle of the room thinking. I then 
took off my coat, and thought a little 
more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning 
to feel very cold now, half undressed 
as I was, and remembering what the 
landlord said about the harpooneer’s 
not coming home at all that night, it 
being so very late, I made no more ado, 
but jumped out of my pantaloons and 
boots, and then blowing out the light 
tumbled into bed, and commended myself 
to the care of heaven.

Whether that mattress was stuffed with 
corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is 
no telling, but I rolled about a good 
deal, and could not sleep for a long 
time. At last I slid off into a light 
doze, and had pretty nearly made a good 
offing towards the land of Nod, when I 
heard a heavy footfall in the passage, 
and saw a glimmer of light come into 
the room from under the door.

Lord save me, thinks I, that must be 
the harpooneer, the infernal 
head-peddler. But I lay perfectly 
still, and resolved not to say a word 
till spoken to. Holding a light in one 
hand, and that identical New Zealand 
head in the other, the stranger entered 
the room, and without looking towards 
the bed, placed his candle a good way 
off from me on the floor in one corner, 
and then began working away at the 
knotted cords of the large bag I before 
spoke of as being in the room. I was 
all eagerness to see his face, but he 
kept it averted for some time while 
employed in unlacing the bag’s mouth. 
This accomplished, however, he turned 
round—when, good heavens! what a sight! 
Such a face! It was of a dark, 
purplish, yellow colour, here and there 
stuck over with large blackish looking 
squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, 
he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been in 
a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here 
he is, just from the surgeon. But at 
that moment he chanced to turn his face 
so towards the light, that I plainly 
saw they could not be sticking-plasters 
at all, those black squares on his 
cheeks. They were stains of some sort 
or other. At first I knew not what to 
make of this; but soon an inkling of 
the truth occurred to me. I remembered 
a story of a white man—a whaleman 
too—who, falling among the cannibals, 
had been tattooed by them. I concluded 
that this harpooneer, in the course of 
his distant voyages, must have met with 
a similar adventure. And what is it, 
thought I, after all! It’s only his 
outside; a man can be honest in any 
sort of skin. But then, what to make of 
his unearthly complexion, that part of 
it, I mean, lying round about, and 
completely independent of the squares 
of tattooing. To be sure, it might be 
nothing but a good coat of tropical 
tanning; but I never heard of a hot 
sun’s tanning a white man into a 
purplish yellow one. However, I had 
never been in the South Seas; and 
perhaps the sun there produced these 
extraordinary effects upon the skin. 
Now, while all these ideas were passing 
through me like lightning, this 
harpooneer never noticed me at all. 
But, after some difficulty having 
opened his bag, he commenced fumbling 
in it, and presently pulled out a sort 
of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet 
with the hair on. Placing these on the 
old chest in the middle of the room, he 
then took the New Zealand head—a 
ghastly thing enough—and crammed it 
down into the bag. He now took off his 
hat—a new beaver hat—when I came nigh 
singing out with fresh surprise. There 
was no hair on his head—none to speak 
of at least—nothing but a small 
scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. 
His bald purplish head now looked for 
all the world like a mildewed skull. 
Had not the stranger stood between me 
and the door, I would have bolted out 
of it quicker than ever I bolted a 
dinner.

Even as it was, I thought something of 
slipping out of the window, but it was 
the second floor back. I am no coward, 
but what to make of this head-peddling 
purple rascal altogether passed my 
comprehension. Ignorance is the parent 
of fear, and being completely 
nonplussed and confounded about the 
stranger, I confess I was now as much 
afraid of him as if it was the devil 
himself who had thus broken into my 
room at the dead of night. In fact, I 
was so afraid of him that I was not 
game enough just then to address him, 
and demand a satisfactory answer 
concerning what seemed inexplicable in 
him.

Meanwhile, he continued the business of 
undressing, and at last showed his 
chest and arms. As I live, these 
covered parts of him were checkered 
with the same squares as his face; his 
back, too, was all over the same dark 
squares; he seemed to have been in a 
Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped 
from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. 
Still more, his very legs were marked, 
as if a parcel of dark green frogs were 
running up the trunks of young palms. 
It was now quite plain that he must be 
some abominable savage or other shipped 
aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, 
and so landed in this Christian 
country. I quaked to think of it. A 
peddler of heads too—perhaps the heads 
of his own brothers. He might take a 
fancy to mine—heavens! look at that 
tomahawk!

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. The 
chimney jambs and all the bricks inside 
were very sooty, so that I thought this 
fire-place made a very appropriate 
little shrine or chapel for his Congo 
idol.

I now screwed my eyes hard towards the 
half hidden image, feeling but ill at 
ease meantime—to see what was next to 
follow. First he takes about a double 
handful of shavings out of his grego 
pocket, and places them carefully 
before the idol; then laying a bit of 
ship biscuit on top and applying the 
flame from the lamp, he kindled the 
shavings into a sacrificial blaze. 
Presently, after many hasty snatches 
into the fire, and still hastier 
withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he 
seemed to be scorching them badly), he 
at last succeeded in drawing out the 
biscuit; then blowing off the heat and 
ashes a little, he made a polite offer 
of it to the little negro. But the 
little devil did not seem to fancy such 
dry sort of fare at all; he never moved 
his lips. All these strange antics were 
accompanied by still stranger guttural 
noises from the devotee, who seemed to 
be praying in a sing-song or else 
singing some pagan psalmody or other, 
during which his face twitched about in 
the most unnatural manner. At last 
extinguishing the fire, he took the 
idol up very unceremoniously, and 
bagged it again in his grego pocket as 
carelessly as if he were a sportsman 
bagging a dead woodcock.

All these queer proceedings increased 
my uncomfortableness, and seeing him 
now exhibiting strong symptoms of 
concluding his business operations, and 
jumping into bed with me, I thought it 
was high time, now or never, before the 
light was put out, to break the spell 
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 tobacco 
smoke. The next moment the light was 
extinguished, and this wild cannibal, 
tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into 
bed with me. I sang out, I could not 
help it now; and giving a sudden grunt 
of astonishment he began feeling me.

Stammering out something, I knew not 
what, I rolled away from him against 
the wall, and then conjured him, 
whoever or whatever he might be, to 
keep quiet, and let me get up and light 
the lamp again. But his guttural 
responses satisfied me at once that he 
but ill comprehended my meaning.

“Who-e debel you?”—he at last said—“you 
no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.” And so 
saying the lighted tomahawk began 
flourishing about me in the dark.

“Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter 
Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! 
Coffin! Angels! save me!”

“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or 
dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the 
cannibal, while his horrid flourishings 
of the tomahawk scattered the hot 
tobacco ashes about me till I thought 
my linen would get on fire. But thank 
heaven, at that moment the landlord 
came into the room light in hand, and 
leaping from the bed I ran up to him.

“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, 
grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldn’t 
harm a hair of your head.”

“Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and 
why didn’t you tell me that that 
infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?”

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

“Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, 
puffing away at his pipe and sitting up 
in bed.

“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to 
me with his tomahawk, and throwing the 
clothes to one side. He really did this 
in not only a civil but a really kind 
and charitable way. I stood looking at 
him a moment. For all his tattooings he 
was on the whole a clean, comely 
looking cannibal. What’s all this fuss 
I have been making about, thought I to 
myself—the man’s a human being just as 
I am: he has just as much reason to 
fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. 
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than 
a drunken Christian.

“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash 
his tomahawk there, or pipe, or 
whatever you call it; tell him to stop 
smoking, in short, and I will turn in 
with him. But I don’t fancy having a 
man smoking in bed with me. It’s 
dangerous. Besides, I 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 never slept better in 
my life. 

 

CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.

Upon waking next morning about 
daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown 
over me in the most loving and 
affectionate manner. You had almost 
thought I had been his wife. The 
counterpane was of patchwork, full of 
odd little parti-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, partly lying on it as the arm 
did when I first awoke, I could hardly 
tell it from the quilt, they so blended 
their hues together; and it was only by 
the sense of weight and pressure that I 
could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.

My sensations were strange. Let me try 
to explain them. When I was a child, I 
well remember a somewhat similar 
circumstance that befell me; whether it 
was a reality or a dream, I never could 
entirely settle. The circumstance was 
this. I had been cutting up some caper 
or other—I think it was trying to crawl 
up the chimney, as I had seen a little 
sweep do a few days previous; and my 
stepmother who, somehow or other, was 
all the time whipping me, or sending me 
to bed supperless,—my mother dragged me 
by the legs out of the chimney and 
packed me off to bed, though it was 
only two o’clock in the afternoon of 
the 21st June, the longest day in the 
year in our hemisphere. I felt 
dreadfully. But there was no help for 
it, so up stairs I went to my little 
room in the third floor, undressed 
myself as slowly as possible so as to 
kill time, and with a bitter sigh got 
between the sheets.

I lay there dismally calculating that 
sixteen entire hours must elapse before 
I could hope for a resurrection. 
Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my 
back ached to think of it. And it was 
so light too; the sun shining in at the 
window, and a great rattling of coaches 
in the streets, and the sound of gay 
voices all over the house. I felt worse 
and worse—at last I got up, dressed, 
and softly going down in my stockinged 
feet, sought out my stepmother, and 
suddenly threw myself at her feet, 
beseeching her as a particular favour 
to give me a good slippering for my 
misbehaviour; anything indeed but 
condemning me to lie abed such an 
unendurable length of time. But she was 
the best and most conscientious of 
stepmothers, and back I had to go to my 
room. For several hours I lay there 
broad awake, feeling a great deal worse 
than I have ever done since, even from 
the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At 
last I must have fallen into a troubled 
nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking 
from it—half steeped in dreams—I opened 
my eyes, and the before sun-lit room 
was now wrapped in outer darkness. 
Instantly I felt a shock running 
through all my frame; nothing was to be 
seen, and nothing was to be heard; but 
a supernatural hand seemed placed in 
mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, 
and the nameless, unimaginable, silent 
form or phantom, to which the hand 
belonged, seemed closely seated by my 
bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on 
ages, I lay there, frozen with the most 
awful fears, not daring to drag away my 
hand; yet ever thinking that if I could 
but stir it one single inch, the horrid 
spell would be broken. I knew not how 
this consciousness at last glided away 
from me; but waking in the morning, I 
shudderingly remembered it all, and for 
days and weeks and months afterwards I 
lost myself in confounding attempts to 
explain the mystery. Nay, to this very 
hour, I often puzzle myself with it.

Now, take away the awful fear, and my 
sensations at feeling the supernatural 
hand in mine were very similar, in 
their strangeness, to those which I 
experienced on waking up and seeing 
Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. 
But at length all the past night’s 
events soberly recurred, one by one, in 
fixed reality, and then I lay only 
alive to the comical predicament. For 
though I tried to move his arm—unlock 
his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as 
he was, he still hugged me tightly, as 
though naught but death should part us 
twain. I now strove to rouse 
him—“Queequeg!”—but his only answer was 
a snore. I then rolled over, my neck 
feeling as if it were in a 
horse-collar; and suddenly felt a 
slight scratch. Throwing aside the 
counterpane, there lay the tomahawk 
sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it 
were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty 
pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in 
a strange house in the broad day, with 
a cannibal and a tomahawk! 
“Queequeg!—in the name of goodness, 
Queequeg, wake!” At length, by dint of 
much wriggling, and loud and incessant 
expostulations upon the unbecomingness 
of his hugging a fellow male in that 
matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded 
in extracting a grunt; and presently, 
he drew back his arm, shook himself all 
over like a Newfoundland dog just from 
the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as 
a pike-staff, looking at me, and 
rubbing his eyes as if he did not 
altogether remember how I came to be 
there, though a dim consciousness of 
knowing something about me seemed 
slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I 
lay quietly eyeing him, having no 
serious misgivings now, and bent upon 
narrowly observing so curious a 
creature. When, at last, his mind 
seemed made up touching the character 
of his bedfellow, and he became, as it 
were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped 
out upon the floor, and by certain 
signs and sounds gave me to understand 
that, if it pleased me, he would dress 
first and then leave me to dress 
afterwards, leaving the whole apartment 
to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under 
the circumstances, this is a very 
civilized overture; but, the truth is, 
these savages have an innate sense of 
delicacy, say what you will; it is 
marvellous how essentially polite they 
are. I pay this particular compliment 
to Queequeg, because he treated me with 
so much civility and consideration, 
while I was guilty of great rudeness; 
staring at him from the bed, and 
watching all his toilette motions; for 
the time my curiosity getting the 
better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a 
man like Queequeg you don’t see every 
day, he and his ways were well worth 
unusual regarding.

He commenced dressing at top by donning 
his beaver hat, a very tall one, by the 
by, and then—still minus his 
trowsers—he hunted up his boots. What 
under the heavens he did it for, I 
cannot tell, but his next movement was 
to crush himself—boots in hand, and hat 
on—under the bed; when, from sundry 
violent gaspings and strainings, I 
inferred he was hard at work booting 
himself; though by no law of propriety 
that I ever heard of, is any man 
required to be private when putting on 
his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, 
was a creature in the transition 
stage—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. 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. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is 
using Rogers’s best cutlery with a 
vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the 
less at this operation when I came to 
know of what fine steel the head of a 
harpoon is made, and how exceedingly 
sharp the long straight edges are 
always kept.

The rest of his toilet was soon 
achieved, and he proudly marched out of 
the room, wrapped up in his great pilot 
monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon 
like a marshal’s baton. 

 

CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.

I quickly followed suit, and descending 
into the bar-room accosted the grinning 
landlord very pleasantly. I cherished 
no malice towards him, though he had 
been skylarking with me not a little in 
the matter of my bedfellow.

However, a good laugh is a mighty good 
thing, and rather too scarce a good 
thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any 
one man, in his own proper person, 
afford stuff for a good joke to 
anybody, let him not be backward, but 
let him cheerfully allow himself to 
spend and be spent in that way. And the 
man that has anything bountifully 
laughable about him, be sure there is 
more in that man than you perhaps think 
for.

The bar-room was now full of the 
boarders who had been dropping in the 
night previous, and whom I had not as 
yet had a good look at. They were 
nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and 
second mates, and third mates, and sea 
carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea 
blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship 
keepers; a brown and brawny company, 
with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy 
set, all wearing monkey jackets for 
morning gowns.

You could pretty plainly tell how long 
each one had been ashore. This young 
fellow’s healthy cheek is like a 
sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem 
to smell almost as musky; he cannot 
have been three days landed from his 
Indian voyage. That man next him looks 
a few shades lighter; you might say a 
touch of satin wood is in him. In the 
complexion of a third still lingers a 
tropic tawn, but slightly bleached 
withal; he doubtless has tarried whole 
weeks ashore. But who could show a 
cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with 
various tints, seemed like the Andes’ 
western slope, to show forth in one 
array, contrasting climates, zone by 
zone.

“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, 
flinging open a door, and in we went to 
breakfast.

They say that men who have seen the 
world, thereby become quite at ease in 
manner, quite self-possessed in 
company. Not always, though: Ledyard, 
the great New England traveller, and 
Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, 
they possessed the least assurance in 
the parlor. But perhaps the mere 
crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn 
by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a 
long solitary walk on an empty stomach, 
in the negro heart of Africa, which was 
the sum of poor Mungo’s 
performances—this kind of travel, I 
say, may not be the very best mode of 
attaining a high social polish. Still, 
for the most part, that sort of thing 
is to be had anywhere.

These reflections just here are 
occasioned by the circumstance that 
after we were all seated at the table, 
and I was preparing to hear some good 
stories about whaling; to my no small 
surprise, nearly every man maintained a 
profound silence. And not only that, 
but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here 
were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom 
without the slightest bashfulness had 
boarded great whales on the high 
seas—entire strangers to them—and 
duelled them dead without winking; and 
yet, here they sat at a social 
breakfast table—all of the same 
calling, all of kindred tastes—looking 
round as sheepishly at each other as 
though they had never been out of sight 
of some sheepfold among the Green 
Mountains. A curious sight; these 
bashful bears, these timid warrior 
whalemen!

But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat 
there among them—at the head of the 
table, too, it so chanced; as cool as 
an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much 
for his breeding. His greatest admirer 
could not have cordially justified his 
bringing his harpoon into breakfast 
with him, and using it there without 
ceremony; reaching over the table with 
it, to the imminent jeopardy of many 
heads, and grappling the beefsteaks 
towards him. But that was certainly 
very coolly 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. 

 

CHAPTER 6. The Street.

If I had been astonished at first 
catching a glimpse of so outlandish an 
individual as Queequeg circulating 
among the polite society of a civilized 
town, that astonishment soon departed 
upon taking my first daylight stroll 
through the streets of New Bedford.

In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any 
considerable seaport will frequently 
offer to view the queerest looking 
nondescripts from foreign parts. Even 
in Broadway and Chestnut streets, 
Mediterranean mariners will sometimes 
jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent 
Street is not unknown to Lascars and 
Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo 
Green, live Yankees have often scared 
the natives. But New Bedford beats all 
Water Street and Wapping. In these 
last-mentioned haunts you see only 
sailors; but in New Bedford, actual 
cannibals stand chatting at street 
corners; savages outright; many of whom 
yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. 
It makes a stranger stare.

But, besides the Feegeeans, 
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. They are mostly 
young, of stalwart frames; fellows who 
have felled forests, and now seek to 
drop the axe and snatch the 
whale-lance. Many are as green as the 
Green Mountains whence they came. In 
some things you would think them but a 
few hours old. Look there! that chap 
strutting round the corner. He wears a 
beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, 
girdled with a sailor-belt and 
sheath-knife. Here comes another with a 
sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.

No town-bred dandy will compare with a 
country-bred one—I mean a downright 
bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the 
dog-days, will mow his two acres in 
buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his 
hands. Now when a country dandy like 
this takes it into his head to make a 
distinguished reputation, and joins the 
great whale-fishery, you should see the 
comical things he does upon reaching 
the seaport. In bespeaking his 
sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to 
his waistcoats; straps to his canvas 
trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how 
bitterly will burst those straps in the 
first howling gale, when thou art 
driven, straps, buttons, and all, down 
the throat of the tempest.

But think not that this famous town has 
only harpooneers, cannibals, and 
bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at 
all. Still New Bedford is a queer 
place. Had it not been for us whalemen, 
that tract of land would this day 
perhaps have been in as howling 
condition as the coast of Labrador. As 
it is, parts of her back country are 
enough to frighten one, they look so 
bony. The town itself is perhaps the 
dearest place to live in, in all New 
England. It is a land of oil, true 
enough: but not like Canaan; a land, 
also, of corn and wine. The streets do 
not run with milk; nor in the 
spring-time do they pave them with 
fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, 
nowhere in all America will you find 
more patrician-like houses; parks and 
gardens more opulent, than in New 
Bedford. Whence came they? how planted 
upon this once scraggy scoria of a 
country?

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

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give 
whales for dowers to their daughters, 
and portion off their nieces with a few 
porpoises a-piece. You must go to New 
Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; 
for, they say, they have reservoirs of 
oil in every house, and every night 
recklessly burn their lengths in 
spermaceti candles.

In summer time, the town is sweet to 
see; full of fine maples—long avenues 
of green and gold. And in August, high 
in air, the beautiful and bountiful 
horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, 
proffer the passer-by their tapering 
upright cones of congregated blossoms. 
So omnipotent is art; which in many a 
district of New Bedford has 
superinduced bright terraces of flowers 
upon the barren refuse rocks thrown 
aside at creation’s final day.

And the women of New Bedford, they 
bloom like their own red roses. But 
roses only bloom in summer; whereas the 
fine carnation of their cheeks is 
perennial as sunlight in the seventh 
heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of 
theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where 
they tell me the young girls breathe 
such musk, their sailor sweethearts 
smell them miles off shore, as though 
they were drawing nigh the odorous 
Moluccas instead of the Puritanic 
sands. 

 

CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.

In this same New Bedford there stands a 
Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the 
moody fishermen, shortly bound for the 
Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to 
make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am 
sure that I did not.

Returning from my first morning stroll, 
I again sallied out upon this special 
errand. The sky had changed from clear, 
sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. 
Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of 
the cloth called bearskin, I fought my 
way against the stubborn storm. 
Entering, I found a small scattered 
congregation of sailors, and sailors’ 
wives and widows. A muffled silence 
reigned, only broken at times by the 
shrieks of the storm. Each silent 
worshipper seemed purposely sitting 
apart from the other, as if each silent 
grief were insular and incommunicable. 
The chaplain had not yet arrived; and 
there these silent islands of men and 
women sat steadfastly eyeing several 
marble tablets, with black borders, 
masoned into the wall on either side 
the pulpit. Three of them ran something 
like the following, but I do not 
pretend to quote:—

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, 
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost 
overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, 
off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836. THIS 
TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS 
SISTER.

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

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late 
CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows 
of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale 
on the coast of Japan, August 3d, 1833. 
THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY 
HIS WIDOW.

Shaking off the sleet from my 
ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated 
myself near the door, and turning 
sideways was surprised to see Queequeg 
near me. Affected by the solemnity of 
the scene, there was a wondering gaze 
of incredulous curiosity in his 
countenance. This savage was the only 
person present who seemed to notice my 
entrance; because he was the only one 
who could not read, and, therefore, was 
not reading those frigid inscriptions 
on the wall. Whether any of the 
relatives of the seamen whose names 
appeared there were now among the 
congregation, I knew not; but so many 
are the unrecorded accidents in the 
fishery, and so plainly did several 
women present wear the countenance if 
not the trappings of some unceasing 
grief, that I feel sure that here 
before me were assembled those, in 
whose unhealing hearts the sight of 
those bleak tablets sympathetically 
caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath 
the green grass; who standing among 
flowers can say—here, here lies my 
beloved; ye know not the desolation 
that broods in bosoms like these. What 
bitter blanks in those black-bordered 
marbles which cover no ashes! What 
despair in those immovable 
inscriptions! What deadly voids and 
unbidden infidelities in the lines that 
seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse 
resurrections to the beings who have 
placelessly perished without a grave. 
As well might those tablets stand in 
the cave of Elephanta as here.

In what census of living creatures, the 
dead of mankind are included; why it is 
that a universal proverb says of them, 
that they tell no tales, though 
containing more secrets than the 
Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his 
name who yesterday departed for the 
other world, we prefix so significant 
and infidel a word, and yet do not thus 
entitle him, if he but embarks for the 
remotest Indies of this living earth; 
why the Life Insurance Companies pay 
death-forfeitures upon immortals; in 
what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and 
deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies 
antique Adam who died sixty round 
centuries ago; how it is that we still 
refuse to be comforted for those who we 
nevertheless maintain are dwelling in 
unspeakable bliss; why all the living 
so strive to hush all the dead; 
wherefore but the rumor of a knocking 
in a tomb will terrify a whole city. 
All these things are not without their 
meanings.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among 
the tombs, and even from these dead 
doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what 
feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket 
voyage, I regarded those marble 
tablets, and by the murky light of that 
darkened, doleful day read the fate of 
the whalemen who had gone before me. 
Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be 
thine. But somehow I grew merry again. 
Delightful inducements to embark, fine 
chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a 
stove boat will make me an immortal by 
brevet. Yes, there is death in this 
business of whaling—a speechlessly 
quick chaotic bundling of a man into 
Eternity. But what then? Methinks we 
have hugely mistaken this matter of 
Life and Death. Methinks that what they 
call my shadow here on earth is my true 
substance. Methinks that in looking at 
things spiritual, we are too much like 
oysters observing the sun through the 
water, and thinking that thick water 
the thinnest of air. Methinks my body 
is but the lees of my better being. In 
fact take my body who will, take it I 
say, it is not me. And therefore three 
cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove 
boat and stove body when they will, for 
stave my soul, Jove himself cannot. 

 

CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.

I had not been seated very long ere a 
man of a certain venerable robustness 
entered; immediately as the 
storm-pelted door flew back upon 
admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing 
of him by all the congregation, 
sufficiently attested that this fine 
old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was 
the famous Father Mapple, so called by 
the whalemen, among whom he was a very 
great favourite. He had been a sailor 
and a harpooneer in his youth, but for 
many years past had dedicated his life 
to the ministry. At the time I now 
write of, Father Mapple was in the 
hardy winter of a healthy old age; that 
sort of old age which seems merging 
into a second flowering youth, for 
among all the fissures of his wrinkles, 
there shone certain mild gleams of a 
newly developing bloom—the spring 
verdure peeping forth even beneath 
February’s snow. No one having 
previously heard his history, could for 
the first time behold Father Mapple 
without the utmost interest, because 
there were certain engrafted clerical 
peculiarities about him, imputable to 
that adventurous maritime life he had 
led. When he entered I observed that he 
carried no umbrella, and certainly had 
not come in his carriage, for his 
tarpaulin hat ran down with melting 
sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket 
seemed almost to drag him to the floor 
with the weight of the water it had 
absorbed. However, hat and coat and 
overshoes were one by one removed, and 
hung up in a little space in an 
adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a 
decent suit, he quietly approached the 
pulpit.

Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was 
a very lofty one, and since a regular 
stairs to such a height would, by its 
long angle with the floor, seriously 
contract the already small area of the 
chapel, the architect, it seemed, had 
acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, 
and finished the pulpit without a 
stairs, substituting a perpendicular 
side ladder, like those used in 
mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The 
wife of a whaling captain had provided 
the chapel with a handsome pair of red 
worsted man-ropes for this ladder, 
which, being itself nicely headed, and 
stained with a mahogany colour, the 
whole contrivance, considering what 
manner of chapel it was, seemed by no 
means in bad taste. Halting for an 
instant at the foot of the ladder, and 
with both hands grasping the ornamental 
knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple 
cast a look upwards, and then with a 
truly sailor-like but still reverential 
dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the 
steps as if ascending the main-top of 
his vessel.

The perpendicular parts of this side 
ladder, as is usually the case with 
swinging ones, were of cloth-covered 
rope, only the rounds were of wood, so 
that at every step there was a joint. 
At my first glimpse of the pulpit, it 
had not escaped me that however 
convenient for a ship, these joints in 
the present instance seemed 
unnecessary. For I was not prepared to 
see Father Mapple after gaining the 
height, slowly turn round, and stooping 
over the pulpit, deliberately drag up 
the ladder step by step, till the whole 
was deposited within, leaving him 
impregnable in his little Quebec.

I pondered some time without fully 
comprehending the reason for this. 
Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide 
reputation for sincerity and sanctity, 
that I could not suspect him of 
courting notoriety by any mere tricks 
of the stage. No, thought I, there must 
be some sober reason for this thing; 
furthermore, it must symbolize 
something unseen. Can it be, then, that 
by that act of physical isolation, he 
signifies his spiritual withdrawal for 
the time, from all outward worldly ties 
and connexions? Yes, for replenished 
with the meat and wine of the word, to 
the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I 
see, is a self-containing stronghold—a 
lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial 
well of water within the walls.

But the side ladder was not the only 
strange feature of the place, borrowed 
from the chaplain’s former sea-farings. 
Between the marble cenotaphs on either 
hand of the pulpit, the wall which 
formed its back was adorned with a 
large painting representing a gallant 
ship beating against a terrible storm 
off a lee coast of black rocks and 
snowy breakers. But high above the 
flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, 
there floated a little isle of 
sunlight, from which beamed forth an 
angel’s face; and this bright face shed 
a distinct spot of radiance upon the 
ship’s tossed deck, something like that 
silver plate now inserted into the 
Victory’s plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, 
noble ship,” the angel seemed to say, 
“beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and 
bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is 
breaking through; the clouds are 
rolling off—serenest azure is at hand.”

Nor was the pulpit itself without a 
trace of the same sea-taste that had 
achieved the ladder and the picture. 
Its panelled front was in the likeness 
of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy 
Bible rested on a projecting piece of 
scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s 
fiddle-headed beak.

What could be more full of meaning?—for 
the pulpit is ever this earth’s 
foremost part; all the rest comes in 
its rear; the pulpit leads the world. 
From thence it is the storm of God’s 
quick wrath is first descried, and the 
bow must bear the earliest brunt. From 
thence it is the God of breezes fair or 
foul is first invoked for favourable 
winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its 
passage out, and not a voyage complete; 
and the pulpit is its prow. 

 

CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.

Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice 
of unassuming authority ordered the 
scattered people to condense. 
“Starboard gangway, there! side away to 
larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! 
Midships! midships!”

There was a low rumbling of heavy 
sea-boots among the benches, and a 
still slighter shuffling of women’s 
shoes, and all was quiet again, and 
every eye on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in 
the pulpit’s bows, folded his large 
brown hands across his chest, uplifted 
his closed eyes, and offered a prayer 
so deeply devout that he seemed 
kneeling and praying at the bottom of 
the sea.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, 
like the continual tolling of a bell in 
a ship that is foundering at sea in a 
fog—in such tones he commenced reading 
the following hymn; but changing his 
manner towards the concluding stanzas, 
burst forth with a pealing exultation 
and joy—

 “The ribs and terrors in the whale, 
Arched over me a dismal gloom, While 
all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And 
lift me deepening down to doom.

 “I saw the opening maw of hell, With 
endless pains and sorrows there; Which 
none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I 
was plunging to despair.

 “In black distress, I called my God, 
When I could scarce believe him mine, 
He bowed his ear to my complaints— No 
more the whale did me confine.

 “With speed he flew to my relief, As 
on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet 
bright, as lightning shone The face of 
my Deliverer God.

 “My song for ever shall record That 
terrible, that joyful hour; I give the 
glory to my God, His all the mercy and 
the power.” 

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, 
which swelled high above the howling of 
the storm. A brief pause ensued; the 
preacher slowly turned over the leaves 
of the Bible, and at last, folding his 
hand down upon the proper page, said: 
“Beloved shipmates, clinch the last 
verse of the first chapter of 
Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great 
fish to swallow up Jonah.’”

“Shipmates, this book, containing only 
four chapters—four yarns—is one of the 
smallest strands in the mighty cable of 
the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the 
soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! 
what a pregnant lesson to us is this 
prophet! What a noble thing is that 
canticle in the fish’s belly! How 
billow-like and boisterously grand! We 
feel the floods surging over us; we 
sound with him to the kelpy bottom of 
the waters; sea-weed and all the slime 
of the sea is about us! But what is 
this lesson that the book of Jonah 
teaches? Shipmates, it is a 
two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all 
as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a 
pilot of the living God. As sinful men, 
it is a lesson to us all, because it is 
a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, 
suddenly awakened fears, the swift 
punishment, repentance, prayers, and 
finally the deliverance and joy of 
Jonah. As with all sinners among men, 
the sin of this son of Amittai was in 
his wilful disobedience of the command 
of God—never mind now what that command 
was, or how conveyed—which he found a 
hard command. But all the things that 
God would have us do are hard for us to 
do—remember that—and hence, he oftener 
commands us than endeavors to persuade. 
And if we obey God, we must disobey 
ourselves; and it is in this disobeying 
ourselves, wherein the hardness of 
obeying God consists.

“With this sin of disobedience in him, 
Jonah still further flouts at God, by 
seeking to flee from Him. He thinks 
that a ship made by men will carry him 
into countries where God does not 
reign, but only the Captains of this 
earth. He skulks about the wharves of 
Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound 
for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a 
hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all 
accounts Tarshish could have been no 
other city than the modern Cadiz. 
That’s the opinion of learned men. And 
where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in 
Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as 
Jonah could possibly have sailed in 
those ancient days, when the Atlantic 
was an almost unknown sea. Because 
Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is 
on the most easterly coast of the 
Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish 
or Cadiz more than two thousand miles 
to the westward from that, just outside 
the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not 
then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to 
flee world-wide from God? Miserable 
man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy 
of all scorn; with slouched hat and 
guilty eye, skulking from his God; 
prowling among the shipping like a vile 
burglar hastening to cross the seas. So 
disordered, self-condemning is his 
look, that had there been policemen in 
those days, Jonah, on the mere 
suspicion of something wrong, had been 
arrested ere he touched a deck. How 
plainly he’s a fugitive! no baggage, 
not a hat-box, valise, or 
carpet-bag,—no friends accompany him to 
the wharf with their adieux. At last, 
after much dodging search, he finds the 
Tarshish ship receiving the last items 
of her cargo; and as he steps on board 
to see its Captain in the cabin, all 
the sailors for the moment desist from 
hoisting in the goods, to mark the 
stranger’s evil eye. Jonah sees this; 
but in vain he tries to look all ease 
and confidence; in vain essays his 
wretched smile. Strong intuitions of 
the man assure the mariners he can be 
no innocent. In their gamesome but 
still serious way, one whispers to the 
other—“Jack, he’s robbed a widow;” or, 
“Joe, do you mark him; he’s a 
bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess he’s 
the adulterer that broke jail in old 
Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing 
murderers from Sodom.” Another runs to 
read the bill that’s stuck against the 
spile upon the wharf to which the ship 
is moored, offering five hundred gold 
coins for the apprehension of a 
parricide, and containing a description 
of his person. He reads, and looks from 
Jonah to the bill; while all his 
sympathetic shipmates now crowd round 
Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon 
him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and 
summoning all his boldness to his face, 
only looks so much the more a coward. 
He will not confess himself suspected; 
but that itself is strong suspicion. So 
he makes the best of it; and when the 
sailors find him not to be the man that 
is advertised, they let him pass, and 
he descends into the cabin.

“‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at 
his busy desk, hurriedly making out his 
papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ 
Oh! how that harmless question mangles 
Jonah! For the instant he almost turns 
to flee again. But he rallies. ‘I seek 
a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how 
soon sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy 
Captain had not looked up to Jonah, 
though the man now stands before him; 
but no sooner does he hear that hollow 
voice, than he darts a scrutinizing 
glance. ‘We sail with the next coming 
tide,’ at last he slowly answered, 
still intently eyeing him. ‘No sooner, 
sir?’—‘Soon enough for any honest man 
that goes a passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, 
that’s another stab. But he swiftly 
calls away the Captain from that scent. 
‘I’ll sail with ye,’—he says,—‘the 
passage money how much is that?—I’ll 
pay now.’ For it is particularly 
written, shipmates, as if it were a 
thing not to be overlooked in this 
history, ‘that he paid the fare 
thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And 
taken with the context, this is full of 
meaning.

“Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was 
one whose discernment detects crime in 
any, but whose cupidity exposes it only 
in the penniless. In this world, 
shipmates, sin that pays its way can 
travel freely, and without a passport; 
whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped 
at all frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain 
prepares to test the length of Jonah’s 
purse, ere he judge him openly. He 
charges him thrice the usual sum; and 
it’s assented to. Then the Captain 
knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at 
the same time resolves to help a flight 
that paves its rear with gold. Yet when 
Jonah fairly takes out his purse, 
prudent suspicions still molest the 
Captain. He rings every coin to find a 
counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he 
mutters; and Jonah is put down for his 
passage. ‘Point out my state-room, 
Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m 
travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ‘Thou 
lookest like it,’ says the Captain, 
‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and 
would lock the door, but the lock 
contains no key. Hearing him foolishly 
fumbling there, the Captain laughs 
lowly to himself, and mutters something 
about the doors of convicts’ cells 
being never allowed to be locked 
within. All dressed and dusty as he is, 
Jonah throws himself into his berth, 
and finds the little state-room ceiling 
almost resting on his forehead. The air 
is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in 
that contracted hole, sunk, too, 
beneath the ship’s water-line, Jonah 
feels the heralding presentiment of 
that stifling hour, when the whale 
shall hold him in the smallest of his 
bowels’ wards.

“Screwed at its axis against the side, 
a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in 
Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling 
over towards the wharf with the weight 
of the last bales received, the lamp, 
flame and all, though in slight motion, 
still maintains a permanent obliquity 
with reference to the room; though, in 
truth, infallibly straight itself, it 
but made obvious the false, lying 
levels among which it hung. The lamp 
alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in 
his berth his tormented eyes roll round 
the place, and this thus far successful 
fugitive finds no refuge for his 
restless glance. But that contradiction 
in the lamp more and more appals him. 
The floor, the ceiling, and the side, 
are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience 
hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight 
upwards, so it burns; but the chambers 
of my soul are all in crookedness!’

“Like one who after a night of drunken 
revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, 
but with conscience yet pricking him, 
as the plungings of the Roman 
race-horse but so much the more strike 
his steel tags into him; as one who in 
that miserable plight still turns and 
turns in giddy anguish, praying God for 
annihilation until the fit be passed; 
and at last amid the whirl of woe he 
feels, a deep stupor steals over him, 
as over the man who bleeds to death, 
for conscience is the wound, and 
there’s naught to staunch it; so, after 
sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s 
prodigy of ponderous misery drags him 
drowning down to sleep.

“And now the time of tide has come; the 
ship casts off her cables; and from the 
deserted wharf the uncheered ship for 
Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. 
That ship, my friends, was the first of 
recorded smugglers! the contraband was 
Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not 
bear the wicked burden. A dreadful 
storm comes on, the ship is like to 
break. But now when the boatswain calls 
all hands to lighten her; when boxes, 
bales, and jars are clattering 
overboard; when the wind is shrieking, 
and the men are yelling, and every 
plank thunders with trampling feet 
right over Jonah’s head; in all this 
raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous 
sleep. He sees no black sky and raging 
sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and 
little hears he or heeds he the far 
rush of the mighty whale, which even 
now with open mouth is cleaving the 
seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah 
was gone down into the sides of the 
ship—a berth in the cabin as I have 
taken it, and was fast asleep. But the 
frightened master comes to him, and 
shrieks in his dead ear, ‘What meanest 
thou, O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled from 
his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah 
staggers to his feet, and stumbling to 
the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out 
upon the sea. But at that moment he is 
sprung upon by a panther billow leaping 
over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus 
leaps into the ship, and finding no 
speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, 
till the mariners come nigh to drowning 
while yet afloat. And ever, as the 
white moon shows her affrighted face 
from the steep gullies in the blackness 
overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing 
bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon 
beat downward again towards the 
tormented deep.

“Terrors upon terrors run shouting 
through his soul. In all his cringing 
attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too 
plainly known. The sailors mark him; 
more and more certain grow their 
suspicions of him, and at last, fully 
to test the truth, by referring the 
whole matter to high Heaven, they fall 
to casting lots, to see for whose cause 
this great tempest was upon them. The 
lot is Jonah’s; that discovered, then 
how furiously they mob him with their 
questions. ‘What is thine occupation? 
Whence comest thou? Thy country? What 
people? But mark now, my shipmates, the 
behavior of poor Jonah. The eager 
mariners but ask him who he is, and 
where from; whereas, they not only 
receive an answer to those questions, 
but likewise another answer to a 
question not put by them, but the 
unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah 
by the hard hand of God that is upon 
him.

“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I 
fear the Lord the God of Heaven who 
hath made the sea and the dry land!’ 
Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest 
thou fear the Lord God then! 
Straightway, he now goes on to make a 
full confession; whereupon the mariners 
became more and more appalled, but 
still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not 
yet supplicating God for mercy, since 
he but too well knew the darkness of 
his deserts,—when wretched Jonah cries 
out to them to take him and cast him 
forth into the sea, for he knew that 
for his sake this great tempest was 
upon them; they mercifully turn from 
him, and seek by other means to save 
the ship. But all in vain; the 
indignant gale howls louder; then, with 
one hand raised invokingly to God, with 
the other they not unreluctantly lay 
hold of Jonah.

“And now behold Jonah taken up as an 
anchor and dropped into the sea; when 
instantly an oily calmness floats out 
from the east, and the sea is still, as 
Jonah carries down the gale with him, 
leaving smooth water behind. He goes 
down in the whirling heart of such a 
masterless commotion that he scarce 
heeds the moment when he drops seething 
into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and 
the whale shoots-to all his ivory 
teeth, like so many white bolts, upon 
his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the 
Lord out of the fish’s belly. But 
observe his prayer, and learn a weighty 
lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does 
not weep and wail for direct 
deliverance. He feels that his dreadful 
punishment is just. He leaves all his 
deliverance to God, contenting himself 
with this, that spite of all his pains 
and pangs, he will still look towards 
His holy temple. And here, shipmates, 
is true and faithful repentance; not 
clamorous for pardon, but grateful for 
punishment. And how pleasing to God was 
this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the 
eventual deliverance of him from the 
sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not 
place Jonah before you to be copied for 
his sin but I do place him before you 
as a model for repentance. Sin not; but 
if you do, take heed to repent of it 
like Jonah.”

While he was speaking these words, the 
howling of the shrieking, slanting 
storm without seemed to add new power 
to the preacher, who, when describing 
Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a 
storm himself. His deep chest heaved as 
with a ground-swell; his tossed arms 
seemed the warring elements at work; 
and the thunders that rolled away from 
off his swarthy brow, and the light 
leaping from his eye, made all his 
simple hearers look on him with a quick 
fear that was strange to them.

There now came a lull in his look, as 
he silently turned over the leaves of 
the Book once more; and, at last, 
standing motionless, with closed eyes, 
for the moment, seemed communing with 
God and himself.

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

“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand 
upon you; both his hands press upon me. 
I have read ye by what murky light may 
be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches 
to all sinners; and therefore to ye, 
and still more to me, for I am a 
greater sinner than ye. And now how 
gladly would I come down from this 
mast-head and sit on the hatches there 
where you sit, and listen as you 
listen, while some one of you reads me 
that other and more awful lesson which 
Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the 
living God. How being an anointed 
pilot-prophet, or speaker of true 
things, and bidden by the Lord to sound 
those unwelcome truths in the ears of a 
wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the 
hostility he should raise, fled from 
his mission, and sought to escape his 
duty and his God by taking ship at 
Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish 
he never reached. As we have seen, God 
came upon him in the whale, and 
swallowed him down to living gulfs of 
doom, and with swift slantings tore him 
along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ 
where the eddying depths sucked him ten 
thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds 
were wrapped about his head,’ and all 
the watery world of woe bowled over 
him. Yet even then beyond the reach of 
any plummet—‘out of the belly of 
hell’—when the whale grounded upon the 
ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God 
heard the engulphed, repenting prophet 
when he cried. Then God spake unto the 
fish; and from the shuddering cold and 
blackness of the sea, the whale came 
breeching up towards the warm and 
pleasant sun, and all the delights of 
air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah 
upon the dry land;’ when the word of 
the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, 
bruised and beaten—his ears, like two 
sea-shells, still multitudinously 
murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the 
Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, 
shipmates? To preach the Truth to the 
face of Falsehood! That was it!

“This, shipmates, this is that other 
lesson; and woe to that pilot of the 
living God who slights it. Woe to him 
whom this world charms from Gospel 
duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil 
upon the waters when God has brewed 
them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks 
to please rather than to appal! Woe to 
him whose good name is more to him than 
goodness! Woe to him who, in this 
world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him 
who would not be true, even though to 
be false were salvation! Yea, woe to 
him who, as the great Pilot Paul has 
it, while preaching to others is 
himself a castaway!”

He dropped and fell away from himself 
for a moment; then lifting his face to 
them again, showed a deep joy in his 
eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly 
enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the 
starboard hand of every woe, there is a 
sure delight; and higher the top of 
that delight, than the bottom of the 
woe is deep. Is not the main-truck 
higher than the kelson is low? Delight 
is to him—a far, far upward, and inward 
delight—who against the proud gods and 
commodores of this earth, ever stands 
forth his own inexorable self. Delight 
is to him whose strong arms yet support 
him, when the ship of this base 
treacherous world has gone down beneath 
him. Delight is to him, who gives no 
quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, 
and destroys all sin though he pluck it 
out from under the robes of Senators 
and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant 
delight is to him, who acknowledges no 
law or lord, but the Lord his God, and 
is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is 
to him, whom all the waves of the 
billows of the seas of the boisterous 
mob can never shake from this sure Keel 
of the Ages. And eternal delight and 
deliciousness will be his, who coming 
to lay him down, can say with his final 
breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by 
Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. 
I have striven to be Thine, more than 
to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet 
this is nothing: I leave eternity to 
Thee; for what is man that he should 
live out the lifetime of his God?”

He said no more, but slowly waving a 
benediction, covered his face with his 
hands, and so remained kneeling, till 
all the people had departed, and he was 
left alone in the place. 

 

CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.

Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the 
Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite 
alone; he having left the Chapel before 
the benediction some time. He was 
sitting on a bench before the fire, 
with his feet on the stove hearth, and 
in one hand was holding close up to his 
face that little negro idol of his; 
peering hard into its face, and with a 
jack-knife gently whittling away at its 
nose, meanwhile humming to himself in 
his heathenish way.

But being now interrupted, he put up 
the image; and pretty soon, going to 
the table, took up a large book there, 
and placing it on his lap began 
counting the pages with deliberate 
regularity; at every fiftieth page—as I 
fancied—stopping a moment, looking 
vacantly around him, and giving 
utterance to a long-drawn gurgling 
whistle of astonishment. He would then 
begin again at the next fifty; seeming 
to commence at number one each time, as 
though he could not count more than 
fifty, and it was only by such a large 
number of fifties being found together, 
that his astonishment at the multitude 
of pages was excited.

With much interest I sat watching him. 
Savage though he was, and hideously 
marred about the face—at least to my 
taste—his countenance yet had a 
something in it which was by no means 
disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. 
Through all his unearthly tattooings, I 
thought I saw the traces of a simple 
honest heart; and in his large, deep 
eyes, fiery black and bold, there 
seemed tokens of a spirit that would 
dare a thousand devils. And besides all 
this, there was a certain lofty bearing 
about the Pagan, which even his 
uncouthness could not altogether maim. 
He looked like a man who had never 
cringed and never had had a creditor. 
Whether it was, too, that his head 
being shaved, his forehead was drawn 
out in freer and brighter relief, and 
looked more expansive than it otherwise 
would, this I will not venture to 
decide; but certain it was his head was 
phrenologically an excellent one. It 
may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me 
of General Washington’s head, as seen 
in the popular busts of him. It had the 
same long regularly graded retreating 
slope from above the brows, which were 
likewise very projecting, like two long 
promontories thickly wooded on top. 
Queequeg was George Washington 
cannibalistically developed.

Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, 
half-pretending meanwhile to be looking 
out at the storm from the casement, he 
never heeded my presence, never 
troubled himself with so much as a 
single glance; but appeared wholly 
occupied with counting the pages of the 
marvellous book. Considering how 
sociably we had been sleeping together 
the night previous, and especially 
considering the affectionate arm I had 
found thrown over me upon waking in the 
morning, I thought this indifference of 
his very strange. But savages are 
strange beings; at times you do not 
know exactly how to take them. At first 
they are overawing; their calm 
self-collectedness of simplicity seems 
a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also 
that Queequeg never consorted at all, 
or but very little, with the other 
seamen in the inn. He made no advances 
whatever; appeared to have no desire to 
enlarge the circle of his 
acquaintances. All this struck me as 
mighty singular; yet, upon second 
thoughts, there was something almost 
sublime in it. Here was a man some 
twenty thousand miles from home, by the 
way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the 
only way he could get there—thrown 
among people as strange to him as 
though he were in the planet Jupiter; 
and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; 
preserving the utmost serenity; content 
with his own companionship; always 
equal to himself. Surely this was a 
touch of fine philosophy; though no 
doubt he had never heard there was such 
a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be 
true philosophers, we mortals should 
not be conscious of so living or so 
striving. So soon as I hear that such 
or such a man gives himself out for a 
philosopher, I conclude that, like the 
dyspeptic old woman, he must have 
“broken his digester.”

As I sat there in that now lonely room; 
the fire burning low, in that mild 
stage when, after its first intensity 
has warmed the air, it then only glows 
to be looked at; the evening shades and 
phantoms gathering round the casements, 
and peering in upon us silent, solitary 
twain; the storm booming without in 
solemn swells; I began to be sensible 
of strange feelings. I felt a melting 
in me. No more my splintered heart and 
maddened hand were turned against the 
wolfish world. This soothing savage had 
redeemed it. There he sat, his very 
indifference speaking a nature in which 
there lurked no civilized hypocrisies 
and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very 
sight of sights to see; yet I began to 
feel myself mysteriously drawn towards 
him. And those same things that would 
have repelled most others, they were 
the very magnets that thus drew me. 
I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, 
since Christian kindness has proved but 
hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near 
him, and made some friendly signs and 
hints, doing my best to talk with him 
meanwhile. At first he little noticed 
these advances; but presently, upon my 
referring to his last night’s 
hospitalities, he made out to ask me 
whether we were again to be bedfellows. 
I told him yes; whereat I thought he 
looked pleased, perhaps a little 
complimented.

We then turned over the book together, 
and I endeavored to explain to him the 
purpose of the printing, and the 
meaning of the few pictures that were 
in it. Thus I soon engaged his 
interest; and from that we went to 
jabbering the best we could about the 
various outer sights to be seen in this 
famous town. Soon I proposed a social 
smoke; and, producing his pouch and 
tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. 
And then we sat exchanging puffs from 
that wild pipe of his, and keeping it 
regularly passing between us.

If there yet lurked any ice of 
indifference towards me in the Pagan’s 
breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we 
had, soon thawed it out, and left us 
cronies. He seemed to take to me quite 
as naturally and unbiddenly as I to 
him; and when our smoke was over, he 
pressed his forehead against mine, 
clasped me round the waist, and said 
that henceforth we were married; 
meaning, in his country’s phrase, that 
we were bosom friends; he would gladly 
die for me, if need should be. In a 
countryman, this sudden flame of 
friendship would have seemed far too 
premature, a thing to be much 
distrusted; but in this simple savage 
those old rules would not apply.

After supper, and another social chat 
and smoke, we went to our room 
together. He made me a present of his 
embalmed head; took out his enormous 
tobacco wallet, and groping under the 
tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars 
in silver; then spreading them on the 
table, and mechanically dividing them 
into two equal portions, pushed one of 
them towards me, and said it was mine. 
I was going to remonstrate; but he 
silenced me by pouring them into my 
trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He 
then went about his evening prayers, 
took out his idol, and removed the 
paper fireboard. By certain signs and 
symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious 
for me to join him; but well knowing 
what was to follow, I deliberated a 
moment whether, in case he invited me, 
I would comply or otherwise.

I was a good Christian; born and bred 
in the bosom of the infallible 
Presbyterian Church. How then could I 
unite with this wild idolator in 
worshipping his piece of wood? But what 
is worship? thought I. Do you suppose 
now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God 
of heaven and earth—pagans and all 
included—can possibly be jealous of an 
insignificant bit of black wood? 
Impossible! But what is worship?—to do 
the will of God—that is worship. And 
what is the will of God?—to do to my 
fellow man what I would have my fellow 
man to do to me—that is the will of 
God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. 
And what do I wish that this Queequeg 
would do to me? Why, unite with me in 
my particular Presbyterian form of 
worship. Consequently, I must then 
unite with him in his; ergo, I must 
turn idolator. So I kindled the 
shavings; helped prop up the innocent 
little idol; offered him burnt biscuit 
with Queequeg; salamed before him twice 
or thrice; kissed his nose; and that 
done, we undressed and went to bed, at 
peace with our own consciences and all 
the world. But we did not go to sleep 
without some little chat.

How it is I know not; but there is no 
place like a bed for confidential 
disclosures between friends. Man and 
wife, they say, there open the very 
bottom of their souls to each other; 
and some old couples often lie and chat 
over old times till nearly morning. 
Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, 
lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair. 

 

CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and 
napping at short intervals, and 
Queequeg now and then affectionately 
throwing his brown tattooed legs over 
mine, and then drawing them back; so 
entirely sociable and free and easy 
were we; when, at last, by reason of 
our confabulations, what little 
nappishness remained in us altogether 
departed, and we felt like getting up 
again, though day-break was yet some 
way down the future.

Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so 
that our recumbent position began to 
grow wearisome, and by little and 
little we found ourselves sitting up; 
the clothes well tucked around us, 
leaning against the head-board with our 
four knees drawn up close together, and 
our two noses bending over them, as if 
our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt 
very nice and snug, the more so since 
it was so chilly out of doors; indeed 
out of bed-clothes too, seeing that 
there was no fire in the room. The more 
so, I say, because truly to enjoy 
bodily warmth, some small part of you 
must be cold, for there is no quality 
in this world that is not what it is 
merely by contrast. Nothing exists in 
itself. If you flatter yourself that 
you are all over comfortable, and have 
been so a long time, then you cannot be 
said to be comfortable any more. But 
if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, 
the tip of your nose or the crown of 
your head be slightly chilled, why 
then, indeed, in the general 
consciousness you feel most 
delightfully and unmistakably warm. For 
this reason a sleeping apartment should 
never be furnished with a fire, which 
is one of the luxurious discomforts of 
the rich. For the height of this sort 
of deliciousness is to have nothing but 
the blanket between you and your 
snugness and the cold of the outer air. 
Then there you lie like the one warm 
spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

We had been sitting in this crouching 
manner for some time, when all at once 
I thought I would open my eyes; for 
when between sheets, whether by day or 
by night, and whether asleep or awake, 
I have a way of always keeping my eyes 
shut, in order the more to concentrate 
the snugness of being in bed. Because 
no man can ever feel his own identity 
aright except his eyes be closed; as if 
darkness were indeed the proper element 
of our essences, though light be more 
congenial to our clayey part. Upon 
opening my eyes then, and coming out of 
my own pleasant and self-created 
darkness into the imposed and coarse 
outer gloom of the unilluminated 
twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced 
a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I at 
all object to the hint from Queequeg 
that perhaps it were best to strike a 
light, seeing that we were so wide 
awake; and besides he felt a strong 
desire to have a few quiet puffs from 
his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I 
had felt such a strong repugnance to 
his smoking in the bed the night 
before, yet see how elastic our stiff 
prejudices grow when love once comes to 
bend them. For now I liked nothing 
better than to have Queequeg smoking by 
me, even in bed, because he seemed to 
be full of such serene household joy 
then. I no more felt unduly concerned 
for the landlord’s policy of insurance. 
I was only alive to the condensed 
confidential comfortableness of sharing 
a pipe and a blanket with a real 
friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn 
about our shoulders, we now passed the 
Tomahawk from one to the other, till 
slowly there grew over us a blue 
hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by 
the flame of the new-lit lamp.

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

 

CHAPTER 12. Biographical.

Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an 
island far away to the West and South. 
It is not down in any map; true places 
never are.

When a new-hatched savage running wild 
about his native woodlands in a grass 
clout, followed by the nibbling goats, 
as if he were a green sapling; even 
then, in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, 
lurked a strong desire to see something 
more of Christendom than a specimen 
whaler or two. His father was a High 
Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; 
and on the maternal side he boasted 
aunts who were the wives of 
unconquerable warriors. There was 
excellent blood in his veins—royal 
stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, 
by the cannibal propensity he nourished 
in his untutored youth.

A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s 
bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to 
Christian lands. But the ship, having 
her full complement of seamen, spurned 
his suit; and not all the King his 
father’s influence could prevail. But 
Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his 
canoe, he paddled off to a distant 
strait, which he knew the ship must 
pass through when she quitted the 
island. On one side was a coral reef; 
on the other a low tongue of land, 
covered with mangrove thickets that 
grew out into the water. Hiding his 
canoe, still afloat, among these 
thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat 
down in the stern, paddle low in hand; 
and when the ship was gliding by, like 
a flash he darted out; gained her side; 
with one backward dash of his foot 
capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up 
the chains; and throwing himself at 
full length upon the deck, grappled a 
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 King, and Queequeg budged not. 
Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, 
and his wild desire to visit 
Christendom, the captain at last 
relented, and told him he might make 
himself at home. But this fine young 
savage—this sea Prince of Wales, never 
saw the Captain’s cabin. They put him 
down among the sailors, and made a 
whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter 
content to toil in the shipyards of 
foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no 
seeming ignominy, if thereby he might 
happily gain the power of enlightening 
his untutored countrymen. For at 
bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by 
a profound desire to learn among the 
Christians, the arts whereby to make 
his people still happier than they 
were; and more than that, still better 
than they were. But, alas! the 
practices of whalemen soon convinced 
him that even Christians could be both 
miserable and wicked; infinitely more 
so, than all his father’s heathens. 
Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and 
seeing what the sailors did there; and 
then going on to Nantucket, and seeing 
how they spent their wages in that 
place also, poor Queequeg gave it up 
for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked 
world in all meridians; I’ll die a 
pagan.

And thus an old idolator at heart, he 
yet lived among these Christians, wore 
their clothes, and tried to talk their 
gibberish. Hence the queer ways about 
him, though now some time from home.

By hints, I asked him whether he did 
not propose going back, and having a 
coronation; since he might now consider 
his father dead and gone, he being very 
old and feeble at the last accounts. He 
answered no, not yet; and added that he 
was fearful Christianity, or rather 
Christians, had unfitted him for 
ascending the pure and undefiled throne 
of thirty pagan Kings before him. But 
by and by, he said, he would return,—as 
soon as he felt himself baptized again. 
For the nonce, however, he proposed to 
sail about, and sow his wild oats in 
all four oceans. They had made a 
harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron 
was in lieu of a sceptre now.

I asked him what might be his immediate 
purpose, touching his future movements. 
He answered, to go to sea again, in his 
old vocation. Upon this, I told him 
that whaling was my own design, and 
informed him of my intention to sail 
out of Nantucket, as being the most 
promising port for an adventurous 
whaleman to embark from. He at once 
resolved to accompany me to that 
island, ship aboard the same vessel, 
get into the same watch, the same boat, 
the same mess with me, in short to 
share my every hap; with both my hands 
in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of 
both worlds. To all this I joyously 
assented; for besides the affection I 
now felt for Queequeg, he was an 
experienced harpooneer, and as such, 
could not fail to be of great 
usefulness to one, who, like me, was 
wholly ignorant of the mysteries of 
whaling, though well acquainted with 
the sea, as known to merchant seamen.

His story being ended with his pipe’s 
last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, 
pressed his forehead against mine, and 
blowing out the light, we rolled over 
from each other, this way and that, and 
very soon were sleeping. 

 

CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.

Next morning, Monday, after disposing 
of the embalmed head to a barber, for a 
block, I settled my own and comrade’s 
bill; using, however, my comrade’s 
money. The grinning landlord, as well 
as the boarders, seemed amazingly 
tickled at the sudden friendship which 
had sprung up between me and 
Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin’s 
cock and bull stories about him had 
previously so much alarmed me 
concerning the very person whom I now 
companied with.

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and 
embarking our things, including my own 
poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas 
sack and hammock, away we went down to 
“the Moss,” the little Nantucket packet 
schooner moored at the wharf. As we 
were going along the people stared; not 
at Queequeg so much—for they were used 
to seeing cannibals like him in their 
streets,—but at seeing him and me upon 
such confidential terms. But we heeded 
them not, going along wheeling the 
barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and 
then stopping to adjust the sheath on 
his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he 
carried such a troublesome thing with 
him ashore, and whether all whaling 
ships did not find their own harpoons. 
To this, in substance, he replied, that 
though what I hinted was true enough, 
yet he had a particular affection for 
his own harpoon, because it was of 
assured stuff, well tried in many a 
mortal combat, and deeply intimate with 
the hearts of whales. In short, like 
many inland reapers and mowers, who go 
into the farmers’ meadows armed with 
their own scythes—though in no wise 
obliged to furnish them—even so, 
Queequeg, for his own private reasons, 
preferred his own harpoon.

Shifting the barrow from my hand to 
his, he told me a funny story about the 
first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It 
was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his 
ship, it seems, had lent him one, in 
which to carry his heavy chest to his 
boarding house. Not to seem ignorant 
about the thing—though in truth he was 
entirely so, concerning the precise way 
in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg 
puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; 
and then shoulders the barrow and 
marches up the wharf. “Why,” said I, 
“Queequeg, you might have known better 
than that, one would think. Didn’t the 
people laugh?”

Upon this, he told me another story. 
The people of his island of Rokovoko, 
it seems, at their wedding feasts 
express the fragrant water of young 
cocoanuts into a large stained calabash 
like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl 
always forms the great central ornament 
on the braided mat where the feast is 
held. Now a certain grand merchant ship 
once touched at Rokovoko, and its 
commander—from all accounts, a very 
stately punctilious gentleman, at least 
for a sea captain—this commander was 
invited to the wedding feast of 
Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young 
princess just turned of ten. Well; when 
all the wedding guests were assembled 
at the bride’s bamboo cottage, this 
Captain marches in, and being assigned 
the post of honour, placed himself over 
against the punchbowl, and between the 
High Priest and his majesty the King, 
Queequeg’s father. Grace being 
said,—for those people have their grace 
as well as we—though Queequeg told me 
that unlike us, who at such times look 
downwards to our platters, they, on the 
contrary, copying the ducks, glance 
upwards to the great Giver of all 
feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the 
High Priest opens the banquet by the 
immemorial ceremony of the island; that 
is, dipping his consecrated and 
consecrating fingers into the bowl 
before the blessed beverage circulates. 
Seeing himself placed next the Priest, 
and noting the ceremony, and thinking 
himself—being Captain of a ship—as 
having plain precedence over a mere 
island King, especially in the King’s 
own house—the Captain coolly proceeds 
to wash his hands in the 
punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a 
huge finger-glass. “Now,” said 
Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t 
our people laugh?”

At last, passage paid, and luggage 
safe, we stood on board the schooner. 
Hoisting sail, it glided down the 
Acushnet river. On one side, New 
Bedford rose in terraces of streets, 
their ice-covered trees all glittering 
in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and 
mountains of casks on casks were piled 
upon her wharves, and side by side the 
world-wandering whale ships lay silent 
and safely moored at last; while from 
others came a sound of carpenters and 
coopers, with blended noises of fires 
and forges to melt the pitch, all 
betokening that new cruises were on the 
start; that one most perilous and long 
voyage ended, only begins a second; and 
a second ended, only begins a third, 
and so on, for ever and for aye. Such 
is the endlessness, yea, the 
intolerableness of all earthly effort.

Gaining the more open water, the 
bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little 
Moss tossed the quick foam from her 
bows, as a young colt his snortings. 
How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I 
spurned that turnpike earth!—that 
common highway all over dented with the 
marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and 
turned me to admire the magnanimity of 
the sea which will permit no records.

At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg 
seemed to drink and reel with me. His 
dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed 
his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we 
flew; and our offing gained, the Moss 
did homage to the blast; ducked and 
dived her 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; as though a white man 
were anything more dignified than a 
whitewashed negro. But there were some 
boobies and bumpkins there, who, by 
their intense greenness, must have come 
from the heart and centre of all 
verdure. Queequeg caught one of these 
young saplings mimicking him behind his 
back. I thought the bumpkin’s hour of 
doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, 
the brawny savage caught him in his 
arms, and by an almost miraculous 
dexterity and strength, sent him high 
up bodily into the air; then slightly 
tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the 
fellow landed with bursting lungs upon 
his feet, while Queequeg, turning his 
back upon him, lighted his tomahawk 
pipe and passed it to me for a puff.

“Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, 
running towards that officer; “Capting, 
Capting, here’s the devil.”

“Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a 
gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to 
Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean 
by that? Don’t you know you might have 
killed that chap?”

“What him say?” said Queequeg, as he 
mildly turned to me.

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

“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his 
tattooed face into an unearthly 
expression of disdain, “ah! him bevy 
small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so 
small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big 
whale!”

“Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll 
kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try 
any more of your tricks aboard here; so 
mind your eye.”

But it so happened just then, that it 
was high time for the Captain to mind 
his own eye. The prodigious strain upon 
the main-sail had parted the 
weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom 
was now flying from side to side, 
completely sweeping the entire after 
part of the deck. The poor fellow whom 
Queequeg had handled so roughly, was 
swept overboard; all hands were in a 
panic; and to attempt snatching at the 
boom to stay it, seemed madness. It 
flew from right to left, and back 
again, almost in one ticking of a 
watch, and every instant seemed on the 
point of snapping into splinters. 
Nothing was done, and nothing seemed 
capable of being done; those on deck 
rushed towards the bows, and stood 
eyeing the boom as if it were the lower 
jaw of an exasperated whale. In the 
midst of this consternation, Queequeg 
dropped deftly to his knees, and 
crawling under the path of the boom, 
whipped hold of a rope, secured one end 
to the bulwarks, and then flinging the 
other like a lasso, caught it round the 
boom as it swept over his head, and at 
the next jerk, the spar was that way 
trapped, and all was safe. The schooner 
was run into the wind, and while the 
hands were clearing away the stern 
boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, 
darted from the side with a long living 
arc of a leap. For three minutes or 
more he was seen swimming like a dog, 
throwing his long arms straight out 
before him, and by turns revealing his 
brawny shoulders through the freezing 
foam. I looked at the grand and 
glorious fellow, but saw no one to be 
saved. The greenhorn had gone down. 
Shooting himself perpendicularly from 
the water, Queequeg, now took an 
instant’s glance around him, and 
seeming to see just how matters were, 
dived down and disappeared. A few 
minutes more, and he rose again, one 
arm still striking out, and with the 
other dragging a lifeless form. The 
boat soon picked them up. The poor 
bumpkin was restored. All hands voted 
Queequeg a noble trump; the captain 
begged his pardon. From that hour I 
clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, 
till poor Queequeg took his last long 
dive.

Was there ever such unconsciousness? He 
did not seem to think that he at all 
deserved a medal from the Humane and 
Magnanimous Societies. He only asked 
for water—fresh water—something to wipe 
the brine off; that done, he put on dry 
clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning 
against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing 
those around him, seemed to be saying 
to himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock 
world, in all meridians. We cannibals 
must help these Christians.” 

 

CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.

Nothing more happened on the passage 
worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine 
run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.

Nantucket! Take out your map and look 
at it. See what a real corner of the 
world it occupies; how it stands there, 
away off shore, more lonely than the 
Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere 
hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, 
without a background. There is more 
sand there than you would use in twenty 
years as a substitute for blotting 
paper. Some gamesome wights will tell 
you that they have to plant weeds 
there, they don’t grow naturally; that 
they import Canada thistles; that they 
have to send beyond seas for a spile to 
stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces 
of wood in Nantucket are carried about 
like bits of the true cross in Rome; 
that people there plant toadstools 
before their houses, to get under the 
shade in summer time; that one blade of 
grass makes an oasis, three blades in a 
day’s walk a prairie; that they wear 
quicksand shoes, something like 
Laplander 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.

Look now at the wondrous traditional 
story of how this island was settled by 
the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In 
olden times an eagle swooped down upon 
the New England coast, and carried off 
an infant Indian in his talons. With 
loud lament the parents saw their child 
borne out of sight over the wide 
waters. They resolved to follow in the 
same direction. Setting out in their 
canoes, after a perilous passage they 
discovered the island, and there they 
found an empty ivory casket,—the poor 
little Indian’s skeleton.

What wonder, then, that these 
Nantucketers, born on a beach, should 
take to the sea for a livelihood! They 
first caught crabs and quohogs in the 
sand; grown bolder, they waded out with 
nets for mackerel; more experienced, 
they pushed off in boats and captured 
cod; and at last, launching a navy of 
great ships on the sea, explored this 
watery world; put an incessant belt of 
circumnavigations round it; peeped in 
at Behring’s Straits; and in all 
seasons and all oceans declared 
everlasting war with the mightiest 
animated mass that has survived the 
flood; most monstrous and most 
mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea 
Mastodon, clothed with such 
portentousness of unconscious power, 
that his very panics are more to be 
dreaded than his most fearless and 
malicious assaults!

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, 
these sea hermits, issuing from their 
ant-hill in the sea, overrun and 
conquered the watery world like so many 
Alexanders; parcelling out among them 
the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian 
oceans, as the three pirate powers did 
Poland. Let America add Mexico to 
Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let 
the English overswarm all India, and 
hang out their blazing banner from the 
sun; two thirds of this terraqueous 
globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the 
sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own 
empires; other seamen having but a 
right of way through it. Merchant ships 
are but extension bridges; armed ones 
but floating forts; even pirates and 
privateers, though following the sea as 
highwaymen the road, they but plunder 
other ships, other fragments of the 
land like themselves, without seeking 
to draw their living from the 
bottomless deep itself. The 
Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots 
on the sea; he alone, in Bible 
language, goes down to it in ships; to 
and fro ploughing it as his own special 
plantation. There is his home; there 
lies his business, which a Noah’s flood 
would not interrupt, though it 
overwhelmed all the millions in China. 
He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks 
in the prairie; he hides among the 
waves, he climbs them as chamois 
hunters climb the Alps. For years he 
knows not the land; so that when he 
comes to it at last, it smells like 
another world, more strangely than the 
moon would to an Earthsman. With the 
landless gull, that at sunset folds her 
wings and is rocked to sleep between 
billows; so at nightfall, the 
Nantucketer, out of sight of land, 
furls his sails, and lays him to his 
rest, while under his very pillow rush 
herds of walruses and whales. 

 

CHAPTER 15. Chowder.

It was quite late in the evening when 
the little Moss came snugly to anchor, 
and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we 
could attend to no business that day, 
at least none but a supper and a bed. 
The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had 
recommended us to his cousin Hosea 
Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he 
asserted to be the proprietor of one of 
the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, 
and moreover he had assured us that 
Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was 
famous for his chowders. In short, he 
plainly hinted that we could not 
possibly do better than try pot-luck at 
the Try Pots. But the directions he had 
given us about keeping a yellow 
warehouse on our starboard hand till we 
opened a white church to the larboard, 
and then keeping that on the larboard 
hand till we made a corner three points 
to the starboard, and that done, then 
ask the first man we met where the 
place was: these crooked directions of 
his very much puzzled us at first, 
especially as, at the outset, Queequeg 
insisted that the yellow warehouse—our 
first point of departure—must be left 
on the larboard hand, whereas I had 
understood Peter Coffin to say it was 
on the starboard. However, by dint of 
beating about a little in the dark, and 
now and then knocking up a peaceable 
inhabitant to inquire the way, we at 
last came to something which there was 
no mistaking.

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, 
and suspended by asses’ ears, swung 
from the cross-trees of an old 
top-mast, planted in front of an old 
doorway. The horns of the cross-trees 
were sawed off on the other side, so 
that this old top-mast looked not a 
little like a gallows. Perhaps I was 
over sensitive to such impressions at 
the time, but I could not help staring 
at this gallows with a vague misgiving. 
A sort of crick was in my neck as I 
gazed up to the two remaining horns; 
yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and 
one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A 
Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my 
first whaling port; tombstones staring 
at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and 
here a gallows! and a pair of 
prodigious black pots too! Are these 
last throwing out oblique hints 
touching Tophet?

I was called from these reflections by 
the sight of a freckled woman with 
yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing 
in the porch of the inn, under a dull 
red lamp swinging there, that looked 
much like an injured eye, and carrying 
on a brisk scolding with a man in a 
purple woollen shirt.

“Get along with ye,” said she to the 
man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”

“Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all 
right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”

And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey 
being from home, but leaving Mrs. 
Hussey entirely competent to attend to 
all his affairs. Upon making known our 
desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. 
Hussey, postponing further scolding for 
the present, ushered us into a little 
room, and seating us at a table spread 
with the relics of a recently concluded 
repast, turned round to us and 
said—“Clam or Cod?”

“What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said 
I, with much politeness.

“Clam or Cod?” she repeated.

“A clam for supper? a cold clam; is 
that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?” says 
I, “but that’s a rather cold and clammy 
reception in the winter time, ain’t it, 
Mrs. Hussey?”

But being in a great hurry to resume 
scolding the man in the purple Shirt, 
who was waiting for it in the entry, 
and seeming to hear nothing but the 
word “clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried 
towards an open door leading to the 
kitchen, and bawling out “clam for 
two,” disappeared.

“Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that 
we can make out a supper for us both on 
one clam?”

However, a warm savory steam from the 
kitchen served to belie the apparently 
cheerless prospect before us. But when 
that smoking chowder came in, the 
mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, 
sweet friends! hearken to me. It was 
made of small juicy clams, scarcely 
bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with 
pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork 
cut up into little flakes; the whole 
enriched with butter, and plentifully 
seasoned with pepper and salt. Our 
appetites being sharpened by the frosty 
voyage, and in particular, Queequeg 
seeing his favourite fishing food 
before him, and the chowder being 
surpassingly excellent, we despatched 
it with great expedition: when leaning 
back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. 
Hussey’s clam and cod announcement, I 
thought I would try a little 
experiment. Stepping to the kitchen 
door, I uttered the word “cod” with 
great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In 
a few moments the 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? “But look, Queequeg, ain’t that 
a live eel in your bowl? Where’s your 
harpoon?”

Fishiest of all fishy places was the 
Try Pots, which well deserved its name; 
for the pots there were always boiling 
chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and 
chowder for dinner, and chowder for 
supper, till you began to look for 
fish-bones coming through your clothes. 
The area before the house was paved 
with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a 
polished necklace of codfish vertebra; 
and Hosea Hussey had his account books 
bound in superior old shark-skin. There 
was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, 
which I could not at all account for, 
till one morning happening to take a 
stroll along the beach among some 
fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s 
brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, 
and marching along the sand with each 
foot in a cod’s decapitated head, 
looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.

Supper concluded, we received a lamp, 
and directions from Mrs. Hussey 
concerning the nearest way to bed; but, 
as Queequeg was about to precede me up 
the stairs, the lady reached forth her 
arm, and demanded his harpoon; she 
allowed no harpoon in her chambers. 
“Why not?” said I; “every true whaleman 
sleeps with his harpoon—but why not?” 
“Because it’s dangerous,” says she. 
“Ever since young Stiggs coming from 
that unfort’nt v’y’ge of his, when he 
was gone four years and a half, with 
only three barrels of ile, was found 
dead in my first floor back, with his 
harpoon in his side; ever since then I 
allow no boarders to take sich 
dangerous weepons in their rooms at 
night. So, Mr. Queequeg” (for she had 
learned his name), “I will just take 
this here iron, and keep it for you 
till morning. But the chowder; clam or 
cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?”

“Both,” says I; “and let’s have a 
couple of smoked herring by way of 
variety.” 

 

CHAPTER 16. The Ship.

In bed we concocted our plans for the 
morrow. But to my surprise and no small 
concern, Queequeg now gave me to 
understand, that he had been diligently 
consulting Yojo—the name of his black 
little god—and Yojo had told him two or 
three times over, and strongly insisted 
upon it everyway, that instead of our 
going together among the whaling-fleet 
in harbor, and in concert selecting our 
craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo 
earnestly enjoined that the selection 
of the ship should rest wholly with me, 
inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending 
us; and, in order to do so, had already 
pitched upon a vessel, which, if left 
to myself, I, Ishmael, should 
infallibly light upon, for all the 
world as though it had turned out by 
chance; and in that vessel I must 
immediately ship myself, for the 
present irrespective of Queequeg.

I have forgotten to mention that, in 
many things, Queequeg placed great 
confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s 
judgment and surprising forecast of 
things; and cherished Yojo with 
considerable esteem, as a rather good 
sort of god, who perhaps meant well 
enough upon the whole, but in all cases 
did not succeed in his benevolent 
designs.

Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather 
Yojo’s, touching the selection of our 
craft; I did not like that plan at all. 
I had not a little relied 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. Devil-Dam, 
I do not know the origin of; Tit-bit is 
obvious; Pequod, you will no doubt 
remember, was the name of a celebrated 
tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now 
extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered 
and pryed about the Devil-dam; from 
her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and 
finally, going on board the Pequod, 
looked around her for a moment, and 
then decided that this was the very 
ship for us.

You may have seen many a quaint craft 
in your day, for aught I 
know;—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 these her old antiquities, 
were added new and marvellous features, 
pertaining to the wild business that 
for more than half a century she had 
followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years 
her chief-mate, before he commanded 
another vessel of his own, and now a 
retired seaman, and one of the 
principal owners of the Pequod,—this 
old Peleg, during the term of his 
chief-mateship, had built upon her 
original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, 
all over, with a quaintness both of 
material and device, unmatched by 
anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s 
carved buckler or bedstead. She was 
apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian 
emperor, his neck heavy with pendants 
of polished ivory. She was a thing of 
trophies. A cannibal of a craft, 
tricking herself forth in the chased 
bones of her enemies. All round, her 
unpanelled, open bulwarks were 
garnished like one continuous jaw, with 
the long sharp teeth of the sperm 
whale, inserted there for pins, to 
fasten her old hempen thews and tendons 
to. Those thews ran not through base 
blocks of land wood, but deftly 
travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. 
Scorning a turnstile wheel at her 
reverend helm, she sported there a 
tiller; and that tiller was in one 
mass, curiously carved from the long 
narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. 
The helmsman who steered by that tiller 
in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, 
when he holds back his fiery steed by 
clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but 
somehow a most melancholy! All noble 
things are touched with that.

Now when I looked about the 
quarter-deck, for some one having 
authority, in order to propose myself 
as a candidate for the voyage, at first 
I saw nobody; but I could not well 
overlook a strange sort of tent, or 
rather wigwam, pitched a little behind 
the main-mast. It seemed only a 
temporary erection used in port. It was 
of a conical shape, some ten feet high; 
consisting of the long, huge slabs of 
limber black bone taken from the middle 
and highest part of the jaws of the 
right-whale. Planted with their broad 
ends on the deck, a circle of these 
slabs laced together, mutually sloped 
towards each other, and at the apex 
united in a tufted point, where the 
loose hairy fibres waved to and fro 
like the top-knot on some old 
Pottowottamie Sachem’s head. A 
triangular opening faced towards the 
bows of the ship, so that the insider 
commanded a complete view forward.

And half concealed in this queer 
tenement, I at length found one who by 
his aspect seemed to have authority; 
and who, it being noon, and the ship’s 
work suspended, was now enjoying 
respite from the burden of command. He 
was seated on an old-fashioned oaken 
chair, wriggling all over with curious 
carving; and the bottom of which was 
formed of a stout interlacing of the 
same elastic stuff of which the wigwam 
was constructed.

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

“Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” 
said I, advancing to the door of the 
tent.

“Supposing it be the captain of the 
Pequod, what dost thou want of him?” he 
demanded.

“I was thinking of shipping.”

“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art 
no Nantucketer—ever been in a stove 
boat?”

“No, Sir, I never have.”

“Dost know nothing at all about 
whaling, I dare say—eh?

“Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I 
shall soon learn. I’ve been several 
voyages in the merchant service, and I 
think that—”

“Merchant service be damned. Talk not 
that lingo to me. Dost see that 
leg?—I’ll take that leg away from thy 
stern, if ever thou talkest of the 
marchant service to me again. Marchant 
service indeed! I suppose now ye feel 
considerable proud of having served in 
those marchant ships. But flukes! man, 
what makes thee want to go a whaling, 
eh?—it looks a little suspicious, don’t 
it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast 
thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, 
didst thou?—Dost not think of murdering 
the officers when thou gettest to sea?”

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

“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want 
to know that before I think of shipping 
ye.”

“Well, sir, I want to see what whaling 
is. I want to see the world.”

“Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have 
ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”

“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”

“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab 
is the Captain of this ship.”

“I am mistaken then. I thought I was 
speaking to the Captain himself.”

“Thou art speaking to Captain 
Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to, 
young man. It belongs to me and Captain 
Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for 
the voyage, and supplied with all her 
needs, including crew. We are part 
owners and agents. But as I was going 
to say, if thou wantest to know what 
whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I 
can put ye in a way of finding it out 
before ye bind yourself to it, past 
backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, 
young man, and thou wilt find that he 
has only one leg.”

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

“Lost by a whale! Young man, come 
nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed 
up, crunched by the monstrousest 
parmacetty that ever chipped a 
boat!—ah, ah!”

I was a little alarmed by his energy, 
perhaps also a little touched at the 
hearty grief in his concluding 
exclamation, but said as calmly as I 
could, “What you say is no doubt true 
enough, sir; but how could I know there 
was any peculiar ferocity in that 
particular whale, though indeed I might 
have inferred as much from the simple 
fact of the accident.”

“Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are 
a sort of soft, d’ye see; thou dost not 
talk shark a bit. Sure, ye’ve been to 
sea before now; sure of that?”

“Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you 
that I had been four voyages in the 
merchant—”

“Hard down out of that! Mind what I 
said about the marchant service—don’t 
aggravate me—I won’t have it. But let 
us understand each other. I have given 
thee a hint about what whaling is; do 
ye yet feel inclined for it?”

“I do, sir.”

“Very good. Now, art thou the man to 
pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s 
throat, and then jump after it? Answer, 
quick!”

“I am, sir, if it should be positively 
indispensable to do so; not to be got 
rid of, that is; which I don’t take to 
be the fact.”

“Good again. Now then, thou not only 
wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by 
experience what whaling is, but ye also 
want to go in order to see the world? 
Was not that what ye said? I thought 
so. Well then, just step forward there, 
and take a peep over the weather-bow, 
and then back to me and tell me what ye 
see there.”

For a moment I stood a little puzzled 
by this curious request, not knowing 
exactly how to take it, whether 
humorously or in earnest. But 
concentrating all his crow’s feet into 
one scowl, Captain Peleg started me on 
the errand.

Going forward and glancing over the 
weather bow, I perceived that the ship 
swinging to her anchor with the 
flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing 
towards the open ocean. The prospect 
was unlimited, but exceedingly 
monotonous and forbidding; not the 
slightest variety that I could see.

“Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg 
when I came back; “what did ye see?”

“Not much,” I replied—“nothing but 
water; considerable horizon though, and 
there’s a squall coming up, I think.”

“Well, what 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; and the 
Pequod was as good a ship as any—I 
thought the best—and all this I now 
repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so 
determined, he expressed his 
willingness to ship me.

“And thou mayest as well sign the 
papers right off,” he added—“come along 
with ye.” And so saying, he led the way 
below deck into the cabin.

Seated on the transom was what seemed 
to me a most uncommon and surprising 
figure. It turned out to be Captain 
Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg 
was one of the largest owners of the 
vessel; the other shares, as is 
sometimes the case in these ports, 
being held by a crowd of old 
annuitants; widows, fatherless 
children, and chancery wards; each 
owning about the value of a timber 
head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or 
two in the ship. People in Nantucket 
invest their money in whaling vessels, 
the same way that you do yours in 
approved state stocks bringing in good 
interest.

Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed 
many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, 
the island having been originally 
settled by that sect; and to this day 
its inhabitants in general retain in an 
uncommon measure the peculiarities of 
the Quaker, only variously and 
anomalously modified by things 
altogether alien and heterogeneous. For 
some of these same Quakers are the most 
sanguinary of all sailors and 
whale-hunters. They are fighting 
Quakers; they are Quakers with a 
vengeance.

So that there are instances among them 
of men, who, named with Scripture 
names—a singularly common fashion on 
the island—and in childhood naturally 
imbibing the stately dramatic thee and 
thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from 
the audacious, daring, and boundless 
adventure of their subsequent lives, 
strangely blend with these unoutgrown 
peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes 
of character, not unworthy a 
Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical 
Pagan Roman. And when these things 
unite in a man of greatly superior 
natural force, with a globular brain 
and a ponderous heart; who has also by 
the stillness and seclusion of many 
long night-watches in the remotest 
waters, and beneath constellations 
never seen here at the north, been led 
to think untraditionally and 
independently; receiving all nature’s 
sweet or savage impressions fresh from 
her own virgin voluntary and confiding 
breast, and thereby chiefly, but with 
some help from accidental advantages, 
to learn a bold and nervous lofty 
language—that man makes one in a whole 
nation’s census—a mighty pageant 
creature, formed for noble tragedies. 
Nor will it at all detract from him, 
dramatically regarded, if either by 
birth or other circumstances, he have 
what seems a half wilful overruling 
morbidness at the bottom of his nature. 
For all men tragically great are made 
so through a certain morbidness. Be 
sure of this, O young ambition, all 
mortal greatness is but disease. But, 
as yet we have not to do with such an 
one, but with quite another; and still 
a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only 
results again from another phase of the 
Quaker, modified by individual 
circumstances.

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was 
a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But 
unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a 
rush for what are called serious 
things, and indeed deemed those 
self-same serious things the veriest of 
all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only 
been originally educated according to 
the strictest sect of Nantucket 
Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean 
life, and the sight of many unclad, 
lovely island creatures, round the 
Horn—all that had not moved this native 
born Quaker one single jot, had not so 
much as altered one angle of his vest. 
Still, for all this immutableness, was 
there some lack of common consistency 
about worthy Captain Bildad. Though 
refusing, from conscientious scruples, 
to bear arms against land invaders, yet 
himself had illimitably invaded the 
Atlantic and Pacific; and though a 
sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had 
he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled 
tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How 
now in the contemplative evening of his 
days, the pious Bildad reconciled these 
things in the reminiscence, I do not 
know; but it did not seem to concern 
him much, and very probably he had long 
since come to the sage and sensible 
conclusion that a man’s religion is one 
thing, and this practical world quite 
another. This world pays dividends. 
Rising from a little cabin-boy in short 
clothes of the drabbest drab, to a 
harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied 
waistcoat; from that becoming 
boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, 
and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I 
hinted before, had concluded his 
adventurous career by wholly retiring 
from active life at the goodly age of 
sixty, and dedicating his remaining 
days to the quiet receiving of his 
well-earned income.

Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the 
reputation of being an incorrigible old 
hunks, and in his sea-going days, a 
bitter, hard task-master. They told me 
in Nantucket, though it certainly seems 
a curious story, that when he sailed 
the old Categut whaleman, his crew, 
upon arriving home, were mostly all 
carried ashore to the hospital, sore 
exhausted and worn out. For a pious 
man, especially for a Quaker, he was 
certainly rather hard-hearted, to say 
the least. He never used to swear, 
though, at his men, they said; but 
somehow he got an inordinate quantity 
of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of 
them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to 
have his drab-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.

It might be thought that this was a 
poor way to accumulate a princely 
fortune—and so it was, a very poor way 
indeed. But I am one of those that 
never take on about princely fortunes, 
and am quite content if the world is 
ready to board and lodge me, while I am 
putting up at this grim sign of the 
Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I 
thought that the 275th lay would be 
about the fair thing, but would not 
have been surprised had I been offered 
the 200th, considering I was of a 
broad-shouldered make.

But one thing, nevertheless, that made 
me a little distrustful about receiving 
a generous share of the profits was 
this: Ashore, I had heard something of 
both Captain Peleg and his 
unaccountable old crony Bildad; how 
that they being the principal 
proprietors of the Pequod, therefore 
the other and more inconsiderable and 
scattered owners, left nearly the whole 
management of the ship’s affairs to 
these two. And I did not know but what 
the stingy old Bildad might have a 
mighty deal to say about shipping 
hands, especially as I now found him on 
board the Pequod, quite at home there 
in the cabin, and reading his Bible as 
if at his own fireside. Now while Peleg 
was vainly trying to mend a pen with 
his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no 
small surprise, considering that he was 
such an interested party in these 
proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, 
but went on mumbling to himself out of 
his book, “Lay not up for yourselves 
treasures upon earth, where moth—”

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

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

Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! 
the seven hundred and seventy-seventh! 
Well, old Bildad, you are determined 
that I, for one, shall not lay up many 
lays here below, where moth and rust do 
corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay 
that, indeed; and though from the 
magnitude of the figure it might at 
first deceive a landsman, yet the 
slightest consideration will show that 
though seven hundred and seventy-seven 
is a pretty large number, yet, when you 
come to make a teenth of it, you will 
then see, I say, that the seven hundred 
and seventy-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. Any 
how, young man, he won’t always see me, 
so I don’t suppose he will thee. He’s a 
queer man, Captain Ahab—so some 
think—but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like 
him well enough; no fear, no fear. He’s 
a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain 
Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when he 
does speak, then you may well listen. 
Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above 
the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as 
well as ‘mong the cannibals; been used 
to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed 
his fiery lance in mightier, stranger 
foes than whales. His lance! aye, the 
keenest and the surest that out of all 
our isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; 
no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s 
Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou 
knowest, was a crowned king!”

“And a very vile one. When that wicked 
king was slain, the dogs, did they not 
lick his blood?”

“Come hither to me—hither, hither,” 
said Peleg, with a significance in his 
eye that almost startled me. “Look ye, 
lad; never say that on board the 
Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain 
Ahab did not name himself. ‘Twas a 
foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, 
widowed mother, who died when he was 
only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old 
squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the 
name would somehow prove prophetic. 
And, perhaps, other fools like her may 
tell thee the same. I wish to warn 
thee. It’s a lie. I know Captain Ahab 
well; I’ve sailed with him as mate 
years ago; I know what he is—a good 
man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, 
but a swearing good man—something like 
me—only there’s a good deal more of 
him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never 
very jolly; and I know that on the 
passage home, he was a little out of 
his mind for a spell; but it was the 
sharp shooting pains in his bleeding 
stump that brought that about, as any 
one might see. I know, too, that ever 
since he lost his leg last voyage by 
that accursed whale, he’s been a kind 
of moody—desperate moody, and savage 
sometimes; but that will all pass off. 
And once for all, let me tell thee and 
assure thee, young man, it’s better to 
sail with a moody good captain than a 
laughing bad one. So good-bye to 
thee—and wrong not Captain Ahab, 
because he happens to have a wicked 
name. Besides, my boy, he has a 
wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet, 
resigned girl. Think of that; by that 
sweet girl that old man has a child: 
hold ye then there can be any utter, 
hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; 
stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has 
his humanities!”

As I walked away, I was full of 
thoughtfulness; what had been 
incidentally revealed to me of Captain 
Ahab, filled me with a certain wild 
vagueness of painfulness concerning 
him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a 
sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for 
I don’t know what, unless it was the 
cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also 
felt a strange awe of him; but that 
sort of awe, which I cannot at all 
describe, was not exactly awe; I do not 
know what it was. But I felt it; and it 
did not disincline me towards him; 
though I felt impatience at what seemed 
like mystery in him, so imperfectly as 
he was known to me then. However, my 
thoughts were at length carried in 
other directions, so that for the 
present dark Ahab slipped my mind. 

 

CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.

As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and 
Humiliation, was to continue all day, I 
did not choose to disturb him till 
towards night-fall; for I cherish the 
greatest respect towards everybody’s 
religious obligations, never mind how 
comical, and could not find it in my 
heart to undervalue even a congregation 
of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or 
those other creatures in certain parts 
of our earth, who with a degree of 
footmanism quite unprecedented in other 
planets, bow down before the torso of a 
deceased landed proprietor merely on 
account of the inordinate possessions 
yet owned and rented in his name.

I say, we good Presbyterian Christians 
should be charitable in these things, 
and not fancy ourselves so vastly 
superior to other mortals, pagans and 
what not, because of their half-crazy 
conceits on these subjects. There was 
Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining 
the most absurd notions about Yojo and 
his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg 
thought he knew what he was about, I 
suppose; he seemed to be content; and 
there let him rest. All our arguing 
with him would not avail; let him be, I 
say: and Heaven have mercy on us 
all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for 
we are all somehow dreadfully cracked 
about the head, and sadly need mending.

Towards evening, when I felt assured 
that all his performances and rituals 
must be over, I went up to his room and 
knocked at the door; but no answer. I 
tried to open it, but it was fastened 
inside. “Queequeg,” said I softly 
through the key-hole:—all silent. “I 
say, Queequeg! why don’t you speak? 
It’s I—Ishmael.” But all remained still 
as before. I began to grow alarmed. I 
had allowed him such abundant time; I 
thought he might have had an apoplectic 
fit. I looked through the key-hole; but 
the door opening into an odd corner of 
the room, the key-hole prospect was but 
a crooked and sinister one. I could 
only see part of the foot-board of the 
bed and a line of the wall, but nothing 
more. I was surprised to behold resting 
against the wall the wooden shaft of 
Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady 
the evening previous had taken from 
him, before our mounting to the 
chamber. That’s strange, thought I; but 
at any rate, since the harpoon stands 
yonder, and he seldom or never goes 
abroad without it, therefore he must be 
inside here, and no possible mistake.

“Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. 
Something must have happened. Apoplexy! 
I tried to burst open the door; but it 
stubbornly resisted. Running down 
stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions 
to the first person I met—the 
chamber-maid. “La! la!” she cried, “I 
thought something must be the matter. I 
went to make the bed after breakfast, 
and the door was locked; and not a 
mouse to be heard; and it’s been just 
so silent ever since. But I thought, 
may be, you had both gone off and 
locked your baggage in for safe 
keeping. La! la, ma’am!—Mistress! 
murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!”—and 
with these cries, she ran towards the 
kitchen, I following.

Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a 
mustard-pot in one hand and a 
vinegar-cruet in the other, having just 
broken away from the occupation of 
attending to the castors, and scolding 
her little black boy meantime.

“Wood-house!” cried I, “which way to 
it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch 
something to pry open the door—the 
axe!—the axe! he’s had a stroke; depend 
upon it!”—and so saying I was 
unmethodically rushing up stairs again 
empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey 
interposed the mustard-pot and 
vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of 
her countenance.

“What’s the matter with you, young man?”

“Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for 
the doctor, some one, while I pry it 
open!”

“Look here,” said the landlady, quickly 
putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as 
to have one hand free; “look here; are 
you talking about prying open any of my 
doors?”—and with that she seized my 
arm. “What’s the matter with you? 
What’s the matter with you, shipmate?”

In as calm, but rapid a manner as 
possible, I gave her to understand the 
whole case. Unconsciously clapping the 
vinegar-cruet to one side of her nose, 
she ruminated for an instant; then 
exclaimed—“No! I haven’t seen it since 
I put it there.” Running to a little 
closet under the landing of the stairs, 
she glanced in, and returning, told me 
that Queequeg’s harpoon was missing. 
“He’s killed himself,” she cried. “It’s 
unfort’nate Stiggs done over 
again—there goes another 
counterpane—God pity his poor 
mother!—it will be the ruin of my 
house. Has the poor lad a sister? 
Where’s that girl?—there, Betty, go to 
Snarles the Painter, and tell him to 
paint me a sign, with—“no suicides 
permitted here, and no smoking in the 
parlor;”—might as well kill both birds 
at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to 
his ghost! What’s that noise there? 
You, young man, avast there!”

And running up after me, she caught me 
as I was again trying to force open the 
door.

“I don’t allow it; I won’t have my 
premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith, 
there’s one about a mile from here. But 
avast!” putting her hand in her 
side-pocket, “here’s a key that’ll fit, 
I guess; let’s see.” And with that, she 
turned it in the lock; but, alas! 
Queequeg’s supplemental bolt remained 
unwithdrawn within.

“Have to burst it open,” said I, and 
was running down the entry a little, 
for a good start, when the landlady 
caught at me, again vowing I should not 
break down her premises; but I tore 
from her, and with a sudden bodily rush 
dashed myself full against the mark.

With a prodigious noise the door flew 
open, and the knob slamming against the 
wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; 
and there, good heavens! there sat 
Queequeg, altogether cool and 
self-collected; right in the middle of 
the room; squatting on his hams, and 
holding Yojo on top of his head. He 
looked neither one way nor the other 
way, but sat like a carved image with 
scarce a sign of active life.

“Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, 
“Queequeg, what’s the matter with you?”

“He hain’t been a sittin’ so all day, 
has he?” said the landlady.

But all we said, not a word could we 
drag out of him; I almost felt like 
pushing him over, so as to change his 
position, for it was almost 
intolerable, it seemed so painfully and 
unnaturally constrained; especially, as 
in all probability he had been sitting 
so for upwards of eight or ten hours, 
going too without his regular meals.

“Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s alive at 
all events; so leave us, if you please, 
and I will see to this strange affair 
myself.”

Closing the door upon the landlady, I 
endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to 
take a chair; but in vain. There he 
sat; and all he could do—for all my 
polite arts and blandishments—he would 
not move a peg, nor say a single word, 
nor even look at me, nor notice my 
presence in the slightest way.

I wonder, thought I, if this can 
possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do 
they fast on their hams that way in his 
native island. It must be so; yes, it’s 
part of his creed, I suppose; well, 
then, let him rest; he’ll get up sooner 
or later, no doubt. It can’t last for 
ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only 
comes once a year; and I don’t believe 
it’s very punctual then.

I went down to supper. After sitting a 
long time listening to the long stories 
of some sailors who had just come from 
a plum-pudding voyage, as they called 
it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in 
a schooner or brig, confined to the 
north of the line, in the Atlantic 
Ocean only); after listening to these 
plum-puddingers till nearly eleven 
o’clock, I went up stairs to go to bed, 
feeling quite sure by this time 
Queequeg must certainly have brought 
his Ramadan to a termination. But no; 
there he was just where I had left him; 
he had not stirred an inch. I began to 
grow vexed with him; it seemed so 
downright senseless and insane to be 
sitting there all day and half the 
night on his hams in a cold room, 
holding a piece of wood on his head.

“For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up 
and shake yourself; get up and have 
some supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill 
yourself, Queequeg.” But not a word did 
he reply.

Despairing of him, therefore, I 
determined to go to bed and to sleep; 
and no doubt, before a great while, he 
would follow me. But previous to 
turning in, I took my heavy bearskin 
jacket, and threw it over him, as it 
promised to be a very cold night; and 
he had nothing but his ordinary round 
jacket on. For some time, do all I 
would, I could not get into the 
faintest doze. I had blown out the 
candle; and the mere thought of 
Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting 
there in that uneasy position, stark 
alone in the cold and dark; this made 
me really wretched. Think of it; 
sleeping all night in the same room 
with a wide awake pagan on his hams in 
this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!

But somehow I dropped off at last, and 
knew nothing more till break of day; 
when, looking over the bedside, there 
squatted Queequeg, as if he had been 
screwed down to the floor. But as soon 
as the first glimpse of sun entered the 
window, up he got, with stiff and 
grating joints, but with a cheerful 
look; limped towards me where I lay; 
pressed his forehead again against 
mine; and said his Ramadan was over.

Now, as I before hinted, I have no 
objection to any person’s religion, be 
it what it may, so long as that person 
does not kill or insult any other 
person, because that other person don’t 
believe it also. But when a man’s 
religion becomes really frantic; when 
it is a positive torment to him; and, 
in fine, makes this earth of ours an 
uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I 
think it high time to take that 
individual aside and argue the point 
with him.

And just so I now did with Queequeg. 
“Queequeg,” said I, “get into bed now, 
and lie and listen to me.” I then went 
on, beginning with the rise and 
progress of the primitive religions, 
and coming down to the various 
religions of the present time, during 
which time I labored to show Queequeg 
that all these Lents, Ramadans, and 
prolonged ham-squattings in cold, 
cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; 
bad for the health; useless for the 
soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious 
laws of Hygiene and common sense. I 
told him, too, that he being in other 
things such an extremely sensible and 
sagacious savage, it pained me, very 
badly pained me, to see him now so 
deplorably foolish about this 
ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, 
argued I, fasting makes the body cave 
in; hence the spirit caves in; and all 
thoughts born of a fast must 
necessarily be half-starved. This is 
the reason why most dyspeptic 
religionists cherish such melancholy 
notions about their hereafters. In one 
word, Queequeg, said I, rather 
digressively; hell is an idea first 
born on an undigested apple-dumpling; 
and since then perpetuated through the 
hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by 
Ramadans.

I then asked Queequeg whether he 
himself was ever troubled with 
dyspepsia; expressing the idea very 
plainly, so that he could take it in. 
He said no; only upon one memorable 
occasion. It was after a great feast 
given by his father the king, on the 
gaining of a great battle wherein fifty 
of the enemy had been killed by about 
two o’clock in the afternoon, and all 
cooked and eaten that very evening.

“No more, Queequeg,” said I, 
shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew 
the inferences without his further 
hinting them. I had seen a sailor who 
had visited that very island, and he 
told me that it was the custom, when a 
great battle had been gained there, to 
barbecue all the slain in the yard or 
garden of the victor; and then, one by 
one, they were placed in great wooden 
trenchers, and garnished round like a 
pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; 
and with some parsley in their mouths, 
were sent round with the victor’s 
compliments to all his friends, just as 
though these presents were so many 
Christmas turkeys.

After all, I do not think that my 
remarks about religion made much 
impression upon Queequeg. Because, in 
the first place, he somehow seemed dull 
of hearing on that important subject, 
unless considered from his own point of 
view; and, in the second place, he did 
not more than one third understand me, 
couch my ideas simply as I would; and, 
finally, he no doubt thought he knew a 
good deal more about the true religion 
than I did. He looked at me with a sort 
of condescending concern and 
compassion, as though he thought it a 
great pity that such a sensible young 
man should be so hopelessly lost to 
evangelical pagan piety.

At last we rose and dressed; and 
Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty 
breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so 
that the landlady should not make much 
profit by reason of his Ramadan, we 
sallied out to board the Pequod, 
sauntering along, and picking our teeth 
with halibut bones. 

 

CHAPTER 18. His Mark.

As we were walking down the end of the 
wharf towards the ship, Queequeg 
carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in 
his gruff voice loudly hailed us from 
his wigwam, saying he had not suspected 
my friend was a cannibal, and 
furthermore announcing that he let no 
cannibals on board that craft, unless 
they previously produced their papers.

“What do you mean by that, Captain 
Peleg?” said I, now jumping on the 
bulwarks, and leaving my comrade 
standing on the wharf.

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

“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 
Catholic Church to which you and I, and 
Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, 
and all of us, and every mother’s son 
and soul of us belong; the great and 
everlasting First Congregation of this 
whole worshipping world; we all belong 
to that; only some of us cherish some 
queer crotchets 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 bracing his left knee, 
and poising his harpoon, cried out in 
some such way as this:—

“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on 
water dere? You see him? well, spose 
him one whale eye, well, den!” and 
taking sharp aim at it, he darted the 
iron right over old Bildad’s broad 
brim, clean across the ship’s decks, 
and struck the glistening tar spot out 
of sight.

“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling 
in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye; 
why, dad whale dead.”

“Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his 
partner, who, aghast at the close 
vicinity of the flying harpoon, had 
retreated towards the cabin gangway. 
“Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the 
ship’s papers. We must have Hedgehog 
there, I mean Quohog, in one of our 
boats. Look ye, Quohog, we’ll give ye 
the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than 
ever was given a harpooneer yet out of 
Nantucket.”

So down we went into the cabin, and to 
my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled 
among the same ship’s company to which 
I myself belonged.

When all preliminaries were over and 
Peleg had got everything ready for 
signing, he turned to me and said, “I 
guess, Quohog there don’t know how to 
write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast 
ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy 
mark?”

But at this question, Queequeg, who had 
twice or thrice before taken part in 
similar ceremonies, looked no ways 
abashed; but taking the offered pen, 
copied upon the paper, in the proper 
place, an exact counterpart of a queer 
round figure which was tattooed upon 
his arm; so that through Captain 
Peleg’s obstinate mistake touching his 
appellative, it stood something like 
this:—

Quohog. his X mark.

Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly 
and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at 
last rising solemnly and fumbling in 
the huge pockets of his broad-skirted 
drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, 
and selecting one entitled “The Latter 
Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,” placed 
it in Queequeg’s hands, and then 
grasping them and the book with both 
his, looked earnestly into his eyes, 
and said, “Son of darkness, I must do 
my duty by thee; I am part owner of 
this ship, and feel concerned for the 
souls of all its crew; if thou still 
clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I 
sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not 
for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the 
idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn 
from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, 
I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer 
clear of the fiery pit!”

Something of the salt sea yet lingered 
in old Bildad’s language, 
heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural 
and domestic phrases.

“Avast there, avast there, Bildad, 
avast now spoiling our harpooneer,” 
cried Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never 
make good voyagers—it takes the shark 
out of ‘em; no harpooneer is worth a 
straw who aint pretty sharkish. There 
was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest 
boat-header out of all Nantucket and 
the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, 
and never came to good. He got so 
frightened about his plaguy soul, that 
he shrinked and sheered away from 
whales, for fear of after-claps, in 
case he got stove and went to Davy 
Jones.”

“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting 
his eyes and hands, “thou thyself, as I 
myself, hast seen many a perilous time; 
thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have 
the fear of death; how, then, can’st 
thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou 
beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell 
me, when this same Pequod here had her 
three masts overboard in that typhoon 
on Japan, that same voyage when thou 
went mate with Captain Ahab, did’st 
thou not think of Death and the 
Judgment then?”

“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, 
marching across the cabin, and 
thrusting his hands far down into his 
pockets,—“hear him, all of ye. Think of 
that! When every moment we thought the 
ship would sink! Death and the Judgment 
then? What? With all three masts making 
such an everlasting thundering against 
the side; and every sea breaking over 
us, fore and aft. Think of Death and 
the Judgment then? No! no time to think 
about Death then. Life was what Captain 
Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to 
save all hands—how to rig 
jury-masts—how to get into the nearest 
port; that was what I was thinking of.”

Bildad said no more, but buttoning up 
his coat, stalked on deck, where we 
followed him. There he stood, very 
quietly overlooking some sailmakers who 
were mending a top-sail in the waist. 
Now and then he stooped to pick up a 
patch, or save an end of tarred twine, 
which otherwise might have been wasted. 

 

CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.

“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that 
ship?”

Queequeg and I had just left the 
Pequod, and were sauntering away from 
the water, for the moment each occupied 
with his own thoughts, when the above 
words were put to us by a stranger, 
who, pausing before us, levelled his 
massive forefinger at the vessel in 
question. He was but shabbily 
apparelled in faded jacket and patched 
trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief 
investing his neck. A confluent 
small-pox had in all directions flowed 
over his face, and left it like the 
complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, 
when the rushing waters have been dried 
up.

“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.

“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” 
said I, trying to gain a little more 
time for an uninterrupted look at him.

“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he 
said, drawing back his whole arm, and 
then rapidly shoving it straight out 
from him, with the fixed bayonet of his 
pointed finger darted full at the 
object.

“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the 
articles.”

“Anything down there about your souls?”

“About what?”

“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he 
said quickly. “No matter though, I know 
many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good 
luck to ‘em; and they are all the 
better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a 
fifth wheel to a wagon.”

“What are you jabbering about, 
shipmate?” said I.

“He’s got enough, though, to make up 
for all deficiencies of that sort in 
other chaps,” abruptly said the 
stranger, placing a nervous emphasis 
upon the word he.

“Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this 
fellow has broken loose from somewhere; 
he’s talking about something and 
somebody we don’t know.”

“Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said 
true—ye hav’n’t seen Old Thunder yet, 
have ye?”

“Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again 
riveted with the insane earnestness of 
his manner.

“Captain Ahab.”

“What! the captain of our ship, the 
Pequod?”

“Aye, among some of us old sailor 
chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav’n’t 
seen him yet, have ye?”

“No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, 
but is getting better, and will be all 
right again before long.”

“All right again before long!” laughed 
the stranger, with a solemnly derisive 
sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain 
Ahab is all right, then this left arm 
of mine will be all right; not before.”

“What do you know about him?”

“What did they tell you about him? Say 
that!”

“They didn’t tell much of anything 
about him; only I’ve heard that he’s a 
good whale-hunter, and a good captain 
to his crew.”

“That’s true, that’s true—yes, both 
true enough. But you must jump when he 
gives an order. Step and growl; growl 
and go—that’s the word with Captain 
Ahab. But nothing about that thing that 
happened to him off Cape Horn, long 
ago, when he lay like dead for three 
days and nights; nothing about that 
deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard 
afore the altar in Santa?—heard nothing 
about that, eh? Nothing about the 
silver calabash he spat into? And 
nothing about his losing his leg last 
voyage, according to the prophecy. 
Didn’t ye hear a word about them 
matters and something more, eh? No, I 
don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who 
knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. 
But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve heard tell 
about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, 
ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh 
yes, that every one knows a’most—I mean 
they know he’s only one leg; and that a 
parmacetti took the other off.”

“My friend,” said I, “what all this 
gibberish of yours is about, I don’t 
know, and I don’t much care; for it 
seems to me that you must be a little 
damaged in the head. But if you are 
speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship 
there, the Pequod, then let me tell 
you, that I know all about the loss of 
his leg.”

“All about it, eh—sure you do?—all?”

“Pretty sure.”

With finger pointed and eye levelled at 
the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger 
stood a moment, as if in a troubled 
reverie; then starting a little, turned 
and said:—“Ye’ve shipped, have ye? 
Names down on the papers? Well, well, 
what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to 
be, will be; and then again, perhaps it 
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 not to make one of ‘em.”

“Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us 
that way—you can’t fool us. It is the 
easiest thing in the world for a man to 
look as if he had a great secret in 
him.”

“Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.”

“Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, 
Queequeg, let’s leave this crazy man. 
But stop, tell me your name, will you?”

“Elijah.”

Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, 
both commenting, after each other’s 
fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; 
and agreed that he was nothing but a 
humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we 
had not gone perhaps above a hundred 
yards, when chancing to turn a corner, 
and looking back as I did so, who 
should be seen but Elijah following us, 
though at a distance. Somehow, the 
sight of him struck me so, that I said 
nothing to Queequeg of his being 
behind, but passed on with my comrade, 
anxious to see whether the stranger 
would turn the same corner that we did. 
He did; and then it seemed to me that 
he was dogging us, but with what intent 
I could not for the life of me imagine. 
This circumstance, coupled with his 
ambiguous, half-hinting, 
half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, 
now begat in me all kinds of vague 
wonderments and half-apprehensions, and 
all connected with the Pequod; and 
Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; 
and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver 
calabash; and what Captain Peleg had 
said of him, when I left the ship the 
day previous; and the prediction of the 
squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had 
bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred 
other shadowy things.

I was resolved to satisfy myself 
whether this ragged Elijah was really 
dogging us or not, and with that intent 
crossed the way with Queequeg, and on 
that side of it retraced our steps. But 
Elijah passed on, without seeming to 
notice us. This relieved me; and once 
more, and finally as it seemed to me, I 
pronounced him in my heart, a humbug. 

 

CHAPTER 20. All Astir.

A day or two passed, and there was 
great activity aboard the Pequod. Not 
only were the old sails being mended, 
but new sails were coming on board, and 
bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; 
in short, everything betokened that the 
ship’s preparations were hurrying to a 
close. Captain Peleg seldom or never 
went ashore, but sat in his wigwam 
keeping a sharp look-out upon the 
hands: Bildad did all the purchasing 
and providing at the stores; and the 
men employed in the hold and on the 
rigging were working till long after 
night-fall.

On the day following Queequeg’s signing 
the articles, word was given at all the 
inns where the ship’s company were 
stopping, that their chests must be on 
board before night, for there was no 
telling how soon the vessel might be 
sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our 
traps, resolving, however, to sleep 
ashore till the last. But it seems they 
always give very long notice in these 
cases, and the ship did not sail for 
several days. But no wonder; there was 
a good deal to be done, and there is no 
telling how many things to be thought 
of, before the Pequod was fully 
equipped.

Every one knows what a multitude of 
things—beds, sauce-pans, knives and 
forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, 
nut-crackers, and what not, are 
indispensable to the business of 
housekeeping. Just so with whaling, 
which necessitates a three-years’ 
housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far 
from all grocers, costermongers, 
doctors, bakers, and bankers. And 
though this also holds true of merchant 
vessels, yet not by any means to the 
same extent as with whalemen. For 
besides the great length of the whaling 
voyage, the numerous articles peculiar 
to the prosecution of the fishery, and 
the impossibility of replacing them at 
the remote harbors usually frequented, 
it must be remembered, that of all 
ships, whaling vessels are the most 
exposed to accidents of all kinds, and 
especially to the destruction and loss 
of the very things upon which the 
success of the voyage most depends. 
Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, 
and spare lines and harpoons, and spare 
everythings, almost, but a spare 
Captain and duplicate ship.

At the period of our arrival at the 
Island, the heaviest storage of the 
Pequod had been almost completed; 
comprising her beef, bread, water, 
fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, 
as before hinted, for some time there 
was a continual fetching and carrying 
on board of divers odds and ends of 
things, both large and small.

Chief among those who did this fetching 
and carrying was Captain Bildad’s 
sister, a lean old lady of a most 
determined and indefatigable spirit, 
but withal very kindhearted, who seemed 
resolved that, if she could help it, 
nothing should be found wanting in the 
Pequod, after once fairly getting to 
sea. At one time she would come on 
board with a jar of pickles for the 
steward’s pantry; another time with a 
bunch of quills for the chief mate’s 
desk, where he kept his log; a third 
time with a roll of flannel for the 
small of some one’s rheumatic back. 
Never did any woman better deserve her 
name, which was Charity—Aunt Charity, 
as everybody called her. And like a 
sister of charity did this charitable 
Aunt Charity bustle about hither and 
thither, ready to turn her hand and 
heart to anything that promised to 
yield safety, comfort, and consolation 
to all on board a ship in which her 
beloved brother Bildad was concerned, 
and in which she herself owned a score 
or two of well-saved dollars.

But it was startling to see this 
excellent hearted Quakeress coming on 
board, as she did the last day, with a 
long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still 
longer whaling lance in the other. Nor 
was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at 
all backward. As for Bildad, he carried 
about with him a long list of the 
articles needed, and at every fresh 
arrival, down went his mark opposite 
that article upon the paper. Every once 
in a while Peleg came hobbling out of 
his whalebone den, roaring at the men 
down the hatchways, roaring up to the 
riggers at the mast-head, and then 
concluded by roaring back into his 
wigwam.

During these days of preparation, 
Queequeg and I often visited the craft, 
and as often I asked about Captain 
Ahab, and how he was, and when he was 
going to come on board his ship. To 
these questions they would answer, that 
he was getting better and better, and 
was expected aboard every day; 
meantime, the two captains, Peleg and 
Bildad, could attend to everything 
necessary to fit the vessel for the 
voyage. If I had been downright honest 
with myself, I would have seen very 
plainly in my heart that I did but half 
fancy being committed this way to so 
long a voyage, without once laying my 
eyes on the man who was to be the 
absolute dictator of it, so soon as the 
ship sailed out upon the open sea. But 
when a man suspects any wrong, it 
sometimes happens that if he be already 
involved in the matter, he insensibly 
strives to cover up his suspicions even 
from himself. And much this way it was 
with me. I said nothing, and tried to 
think nothing.

At last it was given out that some time 
next day the ship would certainly sail. 
So next morning, Queequeg and I took a 
very early start. 

 

CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.

It was nearly six o’clock, but only 
grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew 
nigh the wharf.

“There are some sailors running ahead 
there, if I see right,” said I to 
Queequeg, “it can’t be shadows; she’s 
off by sunrise, I guess; come on!”

“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at 
the same time coming close behind us, 
laid a hand upon both our shoulders, 
and then insinuating himself between 
us, stood stooping forward a little, in 
the uncertain twilight, strangely 
peering from Queequeg to me. It was 
Elijah.

“Going aboard?”

“Hands off, will you,” said I.

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

“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 men; but 
it was too dim to be sure.”

“Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. 
“Morning to ye.”

Once more we quitted him; but once more 
he came softly after us; and touching 
my shoulder again, said, “See if you 
can find ‘em now, will ye?

“Find who?”

“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he 
rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was 
going to warn ye against—but never 
mind, never mind—it’s all one, all in 
the family too;—sharp frost this 
morning, ain’t it? Good-bye to ye. 
Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; 
unless it’s before the Grand Jury.” And 
with these cracked words he finally 
departed, leaving me, for the moment, 
in no small wonderment at his frantic 
impudence.

At last, stepping on board the Pequod, 
we found everything in profound quiet, 
not a soul moving. The cabin entrance 
was locked within; the hatches were all 
on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. 
Going forward to the forecastle, we 
found the slide of the scuttle open. 
Seeing a light, we went down, and found 
only an old rigger there, wrapped in a 
tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at 
whole length upon two chests, his face 
downwards and inclosed in his folded 
arms. The profoundest slumber slept 
upon him.

“Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where 
can they have gone to?” said I, looking 
dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed 
that, when on the wharf, Queequeg had 
not at all noticed what I now alluded 
to; hence I would have thought myself 
to have been optically deceived in that 
matter, were it not for Elijah’s 
otherwise inexplicable question. But I 
beat the thing down; and again marking 
the sleeper, jocularly hinted to 
Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit 
up with the body; telling him to 
establish himself accordingly. He put 
his hand upon the sleeper’s rear, as 
though feeling if it was soft enough; 
and then, without more ado, sat quietly 
down there.

“Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” 
said I.

“Oh! perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, 
“my country way; won’t hurt him face.”

“Face!” said I, “call that his face? 
very benevolent countenance then; but 
how hard he breathes, he’s heaving 
himself; get off, Queequeg, you are 
heavy, it’s grinding the face of the 
poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, he’ll 
twitch you off soon. I wonder he don’t 
wake.”

Queequeg removed himself to just beyond 
the head of the sleeper, and lighted 
his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. 
We kept the pipe passing over the 
sleeper, from one to the other. 
Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his 
broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to 
understand that, in his land, owing to 
the absence of settees and sofas of all 
sorts, the king, chiefs, and great 
people generally, were in the custom of 
fattening some of the lower orders for 
ottomans; and to furnish a house 
comfortably in that respect, you had 
only to buy up eight or ten lazy 
fellows, and lay them round in the 
piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very 
convenient on an excursion; much better 
than those garden-chairs which are 
convertible into walking-sticks; upon 
occasion, a chief calling his 
attendant, and desiring him to make a 
settee of himself under a spreading 
tree, perhaps in some damp marshy place.

While narrating these things, every 
time Queequeg received the tomahawk 
from me, he flourished the hatchet-side 
of it over the sleeper’s head.

“What’s that for, Queequeg?”

“Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!”

He was going on with some wild 
reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe, 
which, it seemed, had in its two uses 
both brained his foes and soothed his 
soul, when we were directly attracted 
to the sleeping rigger. The strong 
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 22. Merry Christmas.

At length, towards noon, upon the final 
dismissal of the ship’s riggers, and 
after the Pequod had been hauled out 
from the wharf, and after the 
ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in 
a 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 to all appearances in 
port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign 
of him was yet to be seen; only, they 
said he was in the cabin. But then, the 
idea was, that his presence was by no 
means necessary in getting the ship 
under weigh, and steering her well out 
to sea. Indeed, as that was not at all 
his proper business, but the pilot’s; 
and as he was not yet completely 
recovered—so they said—therefore, 
Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this 
seemed natural enough; especially as in 
the merchant service many captains 
never show themselves on deck for a 
considerable time after heaving up the 
anchor, but remain over the cabin 
table, having a farewell 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 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 haven in 
store; and meads and glades so 
eternally vernal, that the grass shot 
up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, 
remains at midsummer.

At last we gained such an offing, that 
the two pilots were needed no longer. 
The stout sail-boat that had 
accompanied us began ranging alongside.

It was curious and not unpleasing, how 
Peleg and Bildad were affected at this 
juncture, especially Captain Bildad. 
For loath to depart, yet; very loath to 
leave, for good, a ship bound on so 
long and perilous a voyage—beyond both 
stormy Capes; a ship in which some 
thousands of his hard earned dollars 
were invested; a ship, in which an old 
shipmate sailed as captain; a man 
almost as old as he, once more starting 
to encounter all the terrors of the 
pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to 
a thing so every way brimful of every 
interest to him,—poor old Bildad 
lingered long; paced the deck with 
anxious strides; ran down into the 
cabin to speak another farewell word 
there; again came on deck, and looked 
to windward; looked towards the wide 
and endless waters, only bounded by the 
far-off unseen Eastern Continents; 
looked towards the land; looked aloft; 
looked right and left; looked 
everywhere and nowhere; and at last, 
mechanically coiling a rope upon its 
pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg 
by the hand, and holding up a lantern, 
for a moment stood gazing heroically in 
his face, as much as to say, 
“Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can 
stand it; yes, I can.”

As for Peleg himself, he took it more 
like a philosopher; but for all his 
philosophy, there was a tear twinkling 
in his eye, when the lantern came too 
near. And he, too, did not a little run 
from cabin to deck—now a word below, 
and now a word with Starbuck, the chief 
mate.

But, at last, he turned to his comrade, 
with a final sort of look about 
him,—“Captain Bildad—come, old 
shipmate, we must go. Back the 
main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to 
come close alongside, now! Careful, 
careful!—come, Bildad, boy—say your 
last. Luck to ye, Starbuck—luck to ye, 
Mr. Stubb—luck to ye, Mr. 
Flask—good-bye and good luck to ye 
all—and this day three years I’ll have 
a hot supper smoking for ye in old 
Nantucket. Hurrah and away!”

“God bless ye, and have ye in His holy 
keeping, men,” murmured old Bildad, 
almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have 
fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab 
may soon be moving among ye—a pleasant 
sun is all he needs, and ye’ll have 
plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye 
go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. 
Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye 
harpooneers; good white cedar plank is 
raised full three per cent. within the 
year. Don’t forget your prayers, 
either. Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper 
don’t waste the spare staves. Oh! the 
sail-needles are in the green locker! 
Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, 
men; but don’t miss a fair chance 
either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good 
gifts. Have an eye to the molasses 
tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little 
leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the 
islands, Mr. Flask, beware of 
fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don’t 
keep that cheese too long down in the 
hold, Mr. Starbuck; it’ll spoil. Be 
careful with the butter—twenty cents 
the pound it was, and mind ye, if—”

“Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop 
palavering,—away!” and with that, Peleg 
hurried him over the side, and both 
dropt into the boat.

Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp 
night breeze blew between; a screaming 
gull flew overhead; the two hulls 
wildly rolled; we gave three 
heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly 
plunged like fate into the lone 
Atlantic. 

 

CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was 
spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, 
encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, 
the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows 
into the cold malicious waves, who 
should I see standing at her helm but 
Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic 
awe and fearfulness upon the man, who 
in mid-winter just landed from a four 
years’ dangerous voyage, could so 
unrestingly push off again for still 
another tempestuous term. The land 
seemed scorching to his feet. 
Wonderfullest things are ever the 
unmentionable; deep memories yield no 
epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the 
stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me 
only say that it fared with him as with 
the storm-tossed ship, that miserably 
drives along the leeward land. The port 
would fain give succor; the port is 
pitiful; in the port is safety, 
comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm 
blankets, friends, all that’s kind to 
our mortalities. But in that gale, the 
port, the land, is that ship’s direst 
jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; 
one touch of land, though it but graze 
the keel, would make her shudder 
through and through. With all her might 
she crowds all sail off shore; in so 
doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds 
that fain would blow her homeward; 
seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness 
again; for refuge’s sake forlornly 
rushing into peril; her only friend her 
bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye 
seem to see of that mortally 
intolerable truth; that all deep, 
earnest thinking is but the intrepid 
effort of the soul to keep the open 
independence of her sea; while the 
wildest winds of heaven and earth 
conspire to cast her on the 
treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides 
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! 

 

CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.

As Queequeg and I are now fairly 
embarked in this business of whaling; 
and as this business of whaling has 
somehow come to be regarded among 
landsmen as a rather unpoetical and 
disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am 
all anxiety to convince ye, ye 
landsmen, of the injustice hereby done 
to us hunters of whales.

In the first place, it may be deemed 
almost superfluous to establish the 
fact, that among people at large, the 
business of whaling is not accounted on 
a level with what are called the 
liberal professions. If a stranger were 
introduced into any miscellaneous 
metropolitan society, it would but 
slightly advance the general opinion of 
his merits, were he presented to the 
company as a harpooneer, say; and if in 
emulation of the naval officers he 
should append the initials S.W.F. 
(Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting 
card, such a procedure would be deemed 
pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.

Doubtless one leading reason why the 
world declines honouring us whalemen, 
is this: they think that, at best, our 
vocation amounts to a butchering sort 
of business; and that when actively 
engaged therein, we are surrounded by 
all manner of defilements. Butchers we 
are, that is true. But butchers, also, 
and butchers of the bloodiest badge 
have been all Martial Commanders whom 
the world invariably delights to 
honour. And as for the matter of the 
alleged uncleanliness of our business, 
ye shall soon be initiated into certain 
facts hitherto pretty generally 
unknown, and which, upon the whole, 
will triumphantly plant the sperm 
whale-ship at least among the 
cleanliest things of this tidy earth. 
But even granting the charge in 
question to be true; what disordered 
slippery decks of a whale-ship are 
comparable to the unspeakable carrion 
of those battle-fields from which so 
many soldiers return to drink in all 
ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea of 
peril so much enhances the popular 
conceit of the soldier’s profession; 
let me assure ye that many a veteran 
who has freely marched up to a battery, 
would quickly recoil at the apparition 
of the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning 
into eddies the air over his head. For 
what are the comprehensible terrors of 
man compared with the interlinked 
terrors and wonders of God!

But, though the world scouts at us 
whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly 
pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an 
all-abounding adoration! for almost all 
the tapers, lamps, and candles that 
burn round the globe, burn, as before 
so many shrines, to our glory!

But look at this matter in other 
lights; weigh it in all sorts of 
scales; see what we whalemen are, and 
have been.

Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time 
have admirals of their whaling fleets? 
Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his 
own personal expense, fit out whaling 
ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite 
to that town some score or two of 
families from our own island of 
Nantucket? Why did Britain between the 
years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen 
in bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And 
lastly, how comes it that we whalemen 
of America now outnumber all the rest 
of the banded whalemen in the world; 
sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred 
vessels; manned by eighteen thousand 
men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of 
dollars; the ships worth, at the time 
of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year 
importing into our harbors a well 
reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes 
all this, if there be not something 
puissant in whaling?

But this is not the half; look again.

I freely assert, that the cosmopolite 
philosopher cannot, for his life, point 
out one single peaceful influence, 
which within the last sixty years has 
operated more potentially upon the 
whole broad world, taken in one 
aggregate, than the high and mighty 
business of whaling. One way and 
another, it has begotten events so 
remarkable in themselves, and so 
continuously momentous in their 
sequential issues, that whaling may 
well be regarded as that Egyptian 
mother, who bore offspring themselves 
pregnant from her womb. It would be a 
hopeless, endless task to catalogue all 
these things. Let a handful suffice. 
For many years past the whale-ship has 
been the pioneer in ferreting out the 
remotest and least known parts of the 
earth. She has explored seas and 
archipelagoes which had no chart, where 
no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. 
If American and European men-of-war now 
peacefully ride in once savage harbors, 
let them fire salutes to the honour and 
glory of the whale-ship, which 
originally showed them the way, and 
first interpreted between them and the 
savages. They may celebrate as they 
will the heroes of Exploring 
Expeditions, your Cooks, your 
Krusensterns; but I say that scores of 
anonymous Captains have sailed out of 
Nantucket, that were as great, and 
greater than your Cook and your 
Krusenstern. For in their succourless 
empty-handedness, they, in the 
heathenish sharked waters, and by the 
beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, 
battled with virgin wonders and terrors 
that Cook with all his marines and 
muskets would not willingly have dared. 
All that is made such a flourish of in 
the old South Sea Voyages, those things 
were but the life-time commonplaces of 
our heroic Nantucketers. Often, 
adventures which Vancouver dedicates 
three chapters to, these men accounted 
unworthy of being set down in the 
ship’s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, 
the world!

Until the whale fishery rounded Cape 
Horn, no commerce but colonial, 
scarcely any intercourse but colonial, 
was carried on between Europe and the 
long line of the opulent Spanish 
provinces on the Pacific coast. It was 
the whaleman who first broke through 
the jealous policy of the Spanish 
crown, touching those colonies; and, if 
space permitted, it might be distinctly 
shown how from those whalemen at last 
eventuated the liberation of Peru, 
Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old 
Spain, and the establishment of the 
eternal democracy in those parts.

That great America on the other side of 
the sphere, Australia, was given to the 
enlightened world by the whaleman. 
After its first blunder-born discovery 
by a Dutchman, all other ships long 
shunned those shores as pestiferously 
barbarous; but the whale-ship touched 
there. The whale-ship is the true 
mother of that now mighty colony. 
Moreover, in the infancy of the first 
Australian settlement, the emigrants 
were several times saved from 
starvation by the benevolent biscuit of 
the whale-ship luckily dropping an 
anchor in their waters. The uncounted 
isles of all Polynesia confess the same 
truth, and do commercial homage to the 
whale-ship, that cleared the way for 
the missionary and the merchant, and in 
many cases carried the primitive 
missionaries to their first 
destinations. If that double-bolted 
land, Japan, is ever to become 
hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone 
to whom the credit will be due; for 
already she is on the threshold.

But if, in the face of all this, you 
still declare that whaling has no 
aesthetically noble associations 
connected with it, then am I ready to 
shiver fifty lances with you there, and 
unhorse you with a split helmet every 
time.

The whale has no famous author, and 
whaling no famous chronicler, you will 
say.

The whale no famous author, and whaling 
no famous chronicler? Who wrote the 
first account of our Leviathan? Who but 
mighty Job! And who composed the first 
narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but 
no less a prince than Alfred the Great, 
who, with his own royal pen, took down 
the words from Other, the Norwegian 
whale-hunter of those times! And who 
pronounced our glowing eulogy in 
Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!

True enough, but then whalemen 
themselves are poor devils; they have 
no good blood in their veins.

No good blood in their veins? They have 
something better than royal blood 
there. The grandmother of Benjamin 
Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, 
by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the 
old settlers of Nantucket, and the 
ancestress to a long line of Folgers 
and harpooneers—all kith and kin to 
noble Benjamin—this day darting the 
barbed iron from one side of the world 
to the other.

Good again; but then all confess that 
somehow whaling is not respectable.

Whaling not respectable? Whaling is 
imperial! By old English statutory law, 
the whale is declared “a royal fish.” *

Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale 
himself has never figured in any grand 
imposing way.

The whale never figured in any grand 
imposing way? In one of the mighty 
triumphs given to a Roman general upon 
his entering the world’s capital, the 
bones of a whale, brought all the way 
from the Syrian coast, were the most 
conspicuous object in the cymballed 
procession.*

*See subsequent chapters for something 
more on this head.

Grant it, since you cite it; but, say 
what you will, there is no real dignity 
in whaling.

No dignity in whaling? The dignity of 
our calling the very heavens attest. 
Cetus is a constellation in the South! 
No more! Drive down your hat in 
presence of the Czar, and take it off 
to Queequeg! No more! I know a man 
that, in his lifetime, has taken three 
hundred and fifty whales. I account 
that man more honourable than that 
great captain of antiquity who boasted 
of taking as many walled towns.

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, 
there be any as yet undiscovered prime 
thing in me; if I shall ever deserve 
any real repute in that small but high 
hushed world which I might not be 
unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter 
I shall do anything that, upon the 
whole, a man might rather have done 
than to have left undone; if, at my 
death, my executors, or more properly 
my creditors, find any precious MSS. in 
my desk, then here I prospectively 
ascribe all the honour and the glory to 
whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale 
College and my Harvard. 

 

CHAPTER 25. Postscript.

In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I 
would fain advance naught but 
substantiated facts. But after 
embattling his facts, an advocate who 
should wholly suppress a not 
unreasonable surmise, which might tell 
eloquently upon his cause—such an 
advocate, would he not be blameworthy?

It is well known that at the coronation 
of kings and queens, even modern ones, 
a certain curious process of seasoning 
them for their functions is gone 
through. There is a saltcellar of 
state, so called, and there may be a 
castor of state. How they use the salt, 
precisely—who knows? Certain I am, 
however, that a king’s head is solemnly 
oiled at his coronation, even as a head 
of salad. Can it be, though, that they 
anoint it with a view of making its 
interior run well, as they anoint 
machinery? Much might be ruminated 
here, concerning the essential dignity 
of this regal process, because in 
common life we esteem but meanly and 
contemptibly a fellow who anoints his 
hair, and palpably smells of that 
anointing. In truth, a mature man who 
uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that 
man has probably got a quoggy spot in 
him somewhere. As a general rule, he 
can’t amount to much in his totality.

But the only thing to be considered 
here, is this—what kind of oil is used 
at coronations? Certainly it cannot be 
olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor 
oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor 
cod-liver oil. What then can it 
possibly be, but sperm oil in its 
unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the 
sweetest of all oils?

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

 

CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.

The chief mate of the Pequod was 
Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a 
Quaker by descent. He was a long, 
earnest man, and though born on an icy 
coast, seemed well adapted to endure 
hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as 
twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the 
Indies, his live blood would not spoil 
like bottled ale. He must have been 
born in some time of general drought 
and famine, or upon one of those fast 
days for which his state is famous. 
Only some thirty arid summers had he 
seen; those summers had dried up all 
his physical superfluousness. But this, 
his thinness, so to speak, seemed no 
more the token of wasting anxieties and 
cares, than it seemed the indication of 
any bodily blight. It was merely the 
condensation of the man. He was by no 
means ill-looking; quite the contrary. 
His pure tight skin was an excellent 
fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and 
embalmed with inner health and 
strength, like a revivified Egyptian, 
this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure 
for long ages to come, and to endure 
always, as now; for be it Polar snow or 
torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, 
his interior vitality was warranted to 
do well in all climates. Looking into 
his eyes, you seemed to see there the 
yet lingering images of those 
thousand-fold perils he had calmly 
confronted through life. A staid, 
steadfast man, whose life for the most 
part was a telling pantomime of action, 
and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, 
for all his hardy sobriety and 
fortitude, there were certain qualities 
in him which at times affected, and in 
some cases seemed well nigh to 
overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly 
conscientious for a seaman, and endued 
with a deep natural reverence, the wild 
watery loneliness of his life did 
therefore strongly incline him to 
superstition; but to that sort of 
superstition, which in some 
organizations seems rather to spring, 
somehow, from intelligence than from 
ignorance. Outward portents and inward 
presentiments were his. And if at times 
these things bent the welded iron of 
his soul, much more did his far-away 
domestic memories of his young Cape 
wife and child, tend to bend him still 
more from the original ruggedness of 
his nature, and open him still further 
to those latent influences which, in 
some honest-hearted men, restrain the 
gush of dare-devil daring, so often 
evinced by others in the more perilous 
vicissitudes of the fishery. “I will 
have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, 
“who is not afraid of a whale.” By 
this, he seemed to mean, not only that 
the most reliable and useful courage 
was that which arises from the fair 
estimation of the encountered peril, 
but that an utterly fearless man is a 
far more dangerous comrade than a 
coward.

“Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second 
mate, “Starbuck, there, is as careful a 
man as you’ll find anywhere in this 
fishery.” But we shall ere long see 
what that word “careful” precisely 
means when used by a man like Stubb, or 
almost any other whale hunter.

Starbuck was no crusader after perils; 
in him courage was not a sentiment; but 
a thing simply useful to him, and 
always at hand upon all mortally 
practical occasions. Besides, he 
thought, perhaps, that in this business 
of whaling, courage was one of the 
great staple outfits of the ship, like 
her beef and her bread, and not to be 
foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no 
fancy for lowering for whales after 
sun-down; nor for persisting in 
fighting a fish that too much persisted 
in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, 
I am here in this critical ocean to 
kill whales for my living, and not to 
be killed by them for theirs; and that 
hundreds of men had been so killed 
Starbuck well knew. What doom was his 
own father’s? Where, in the bottomless 
deeps, could he find the torn limbs of 
his brother?

With memories like these in him, and, 
moreover, given to a certain 
superstitiousness, as has been said; 
the courage of this Starbuck which 
could, nevertheless, still flourish, 
must indeed have been extreme. But it 
was not in reasonable nature that a man 
so organized, and with such terrible 
experiences and remembrances as he had; 
it was not in nature that these things 
should fail in latently engendering an 
element in him, which, under suitable 
circumstances, would break out from its 
confinement, and burn all his courage 
up. And brave as he might be, it was 
that sort of bravery chiefly, visible 
in some intrepid men, which, while 
generally abiding firm in the conflict 
with seas, or winds, or whales, or any 
of the ordinary irrational horrors of 
the world, yet cannot withstand those 
more terrific, because more spiritual 
terrors, which sometimes menace you 
from the concentrating brow of an 
enraged and mighty man.

But were the coming narrative to reveal 
in any instance, the complete abasement 
of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce 
might I have the heart to write it; for 
it is a thing most sorrowful, nay 
shocking, to expose the fall of 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 manliness we feel 
within ourselves, so far within us, 
that it remains intact though all the 
outer character seem gone; bleeds with 
keenest anguish at the undraped 
spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor 
can piety itself, at such a shameful 
sight, completely stifle her 
upbraidings against the permitting 
stars. But this august dignity I treat 
of, is not the dignity of kings and 
robes, but that abounding dignity which 
has no robed investiture. Thou shalt 
see it shining in the arm that wields a 
pick or drives a spike; that democratic 
dignity which, on all hands, radiates 
without end from God; Himself! The 
great God absolute! The centre and 
circumference of all democracy! His 
omnipresence, our divine equality!

If, then, to meanest mariners, and 
renegades and castaways, I shall 
hereafter ascribe high qualities, 
though dark; weave round them tragic 
graces; if even the most mournful, 
perchance the most abased, among them 
all, shall at times lift himself to the 
exalted mounts; if I shall touch that 
workman’s arm with some ethereal light; 
if I shall spread a rainbow over his 
disastrous set of sun; then against all 
mortal critics bear me out in it, thou 
Just Spirit of Equality, which hast 
spread one royal mantle of humanity 
over all my kind! Bear me out in it, 
thou great democratic God! who didst 
not refuse to the swart convict, 
Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou 
who didst clothe with doubly hammered 
leaves of finest gold, the stumped and 
paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who 
didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the 
pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a 
war-horse; who didst thunder him higher 
than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy 
mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest 
Thy selectest champions from the kingly 
commons; bear me out in it, O God! 

 

CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.

Stubb was the second mate. He was a 
native of Cape Cod; and hence, 
according to local usage, was called a 
Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither 
craven nor valiant; taking perils as 
they came with an indifferent air; and 
while engaged in the most imminent 
crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm 
and collected as a journeyman joiner 
engaged for the year. Good-humored, 
easy, and careless, he presided over 
his whale-boat as if the most deadly 
encounter were but a dinner, and his 
crew all invited guests. He was as 
particular about the comfortable 
arrangement of his part of the boat, as 
an old stage-driver is about the 
snugness of his box. When close to the 
whale, in the very death-lock of the 
fight, he handled his unpitying lance 
coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling 
tinker his hammer. He would hum over 
his old rigadig tunes while flank and 
flank with the most exasperated 
monster. Long usage had, for this 
Stubb, converted the jaws of death into 
an easy chair. What he thought of death 
itself, there is no telling. Whether he 
ever thought of it at all, might be a 
question; but, if he ever did chance to 
cast his mind that way after a 
comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a 
good sailor, he took it to be a sort of 
call of the watch to tumble aloft, and 
bestir themselves there, about 
something which he would find out when 
he obeyed the order, and not sooner.

What, perhaps, with other things, made 
Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing 
man, so cheerily trudging off with the 
burden of life in a world full of grave 
pedlars, all bowed to the ground with 
their packs; what helped to bring about 
that almost impious good-humor of his; 
that thing must have been his pipe. 
For, like his nose, his short, black 
little pipe was one of the regular 
features of his face. You would almost 
as soon have expected him to turn out 
of his bunk without his nose as without 
his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes 
there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, 
within easy reach of his hand; and, 
whenever he turned in, he smoked them 
all out in succession, lighting one 
from the other to the end of the 
chapter; then loading them again to be 
in readiness anew. For, when Stubb 
dressed, instead of first putting his 
legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe 
into his mouth.

I say this continual smoking must have 
been one cause, at least, of his 
peculiar disposition; for every one 
knows that this earthly air, whether 
ashore or afloat, is terribly infected 
with the nameless miseries of the 
numberless mortals who have died 
exhaling it; and as in time of the 
cholera, some people go about with a 
camphorated handkerchief to their 
mouths; so, likewise, against all 
mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco 
smoke might have operated as a sort of 
disinfecting agent.

The third mate was Flask, a native of 
Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A short, 
stout, ruddy young fellow, very 
pugnacious concerning whales, who 
somehow seemed to think that the great 
leviathans had personally and 
hereditarily affronted him; and 
therefore it was a sort of point of 
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 
probably marshal his forces to descend 
on the whales, these three headsmen 
were as captains of companies. Or, 
being armed with their long keen 
whaling spears, they were as a picked 
trio of lancers; even as the 
harpooneers were flingers of javelins.

And since in this famous fishery, each 
mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight 
of old, is always accompanied by his 
boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in 
certain conjunctures provides him with 
a fresh lance, when the former one has 
been badly twisted, or elbowed in the 
assault; and moreover, as there 
generally subsists between the two, a 
close intimacy and friendliness; it is 
therefore but meet, that in this place 
we set down who the Pequod’s 
harpooneers were, and to what headsman 
each of them belonged.

First of all was Queequeg, whom 
Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected 
for his squire. But Queequeg is already 
known.

Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian 
from Gay Head, the most westerly 
promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where 
there still exists the last remnant of 
a village of red men, which has long 
supplied the neighboring island of 
Nantucket with many of her most daring 
harpooneers. In the fishery, they 
usually go by the generic name of 
Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean, 
sable hair, his high cheek bones, and 
black rounding eyes—for an Indian, 
Oriental in their largeness, but 
Antarctic in their glittering 
expression—all this sufficiently 
proclaimed him an inheritor of the 
unvitiated blood of those proud warrior 
hunters, who, in quest of the great New 
England moose, had scoured, bow in 
hand, the aboriginal forests of the 
main. But no longer snuffing in the 
trail of the wild beasts of the 
woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the 
wake of the great whales of the sea; 
the unerring harpoon of the son fitly 
replacing the infallible arrow of the 
sires. To look at the tawny brawn of 
his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost 
have credited the superstitions of some 
of the earlier Puritans, and 
half-believed this wild Indian to be a 
son of the Prince of the Powers of the 
Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second 
mate’s squire.

Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, 
a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage, 
with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to 
behold. Suspended from his ears were 
two golden hoops, so large that the 
sailors called them ring-bolts, and 
would talk of securing the top-sail 
halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo 
had voluntarily shipped on board of a 
whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his 
native coast. And never having been 
anywhere in the world but in Africa, 
Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most 
frequented by whalemen; and having now 
led for many years the bold life of the 
fishery in the ships of owners 
uncommonly heedful of what manner of 
men they shipped; Daggoo retained all 
his barbaric virtues, and erect as a 
giraffe, moved about the decks in all 
the pomp of six feet five in his socks. 
There was a corporeal humility in 
looking up at him; and a white man 
standing before him seemed a white flag 
come to beg truce of a fortress. 
Curious to tell, this imperial negro, 
Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of 
little Flask, who looked like a 
chess-man beside him. As for the 
residue of the Pequod’s company, be it 
said, that at the present day not one 
in two of the many thousand men before 
the mast employed in the American whale 
fishery, are Americans born, though 
pretty nearly all the officers are. 
Herein it is the same with the American 
whale fishery as with the American army 
and military and merchant navies, and 
the engineering forces employed in the 
construction of the American Canals and 
Railroads. The same, I say, because in 
all these cases the native American 
liberally provides the brains, the rest 
of the world as generously supplying 
the muscles. No small number of these 
whaling seamen belong to the Azores, 
where the outward bound Nantucket 
whalers frequently touch to augment 
their crews from the hardy peasants of 
those rocky shores. In like manner, the 
Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull 
or London, put in at the Shetland 
Islands, to receive the full complement 
of their crew. Upon the passage 
homewards, they drop them there again. 
How it is, there is no telling, but 
Islanders seem to make the best 
whalemen. They were nearly all 
Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, 
I call such, not acknowledging the 
common continent of men, but each 
Isolato living on a separate continent 
of his own. Yet now, federated along 
one keel, what a set these Isolatoes 
were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation 
from all the isles of the sea, and all 
the ends of the earth, accompanying Old 
Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s 
grievances before that bar from which 
not very many of them ever come back. 
Black Little Pip—he never did—oh, no! 
he went before. Poor Alabama boy! On 
the grim Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall 
ere long see him, beating his 
tambourine; prelusive of the eternal 
time, when sent for, to the great 
quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike 
in with angels, and beat his tambourine 
in glory; called a coward here, hailed 
a hero there! 

 

CHAPTER 28. Ahab.

For several days after leaving 
Nantucket, nothing above hatches was 
seen of Captain Ahab. The mates 
regularly relieved each other at the 
watches, and for aught that could be 
seen to the contrary, they seemed to be 
the only commanders of the ship; only 
they sometimes issued from the cabin 
with orders so sudden and peremptory, 
that after all it was plain they but 
commanded vicariously. Yes, their 
supreme lord and dictator was there, 
though hitherto unseen by any eyes not 
permitted to penetrate into the now 
sacred retreat of the cabin.

Every time I ascended to the deck from 
my watches below, I instantly gazed aft 
to mark if any strange face were 
visible; for my first vague disquietude 
touching the unknown captain, now in 
the seclusion of the sea, became almost 
a perturbation. This was strangely 
heightened at times by the ragged 
Elijah’s diabolical incoherences 
uninvitedly recurring to me, with a 
subtle energy I could not have before 
conceived of. But poorly could I 
withstand them, much as in other moods 
I was almost ready to smile at the 
solemn whimsicalities of that 
outlandish prophet of the wharves. But 
whatever it was of apprehensiveness or 
uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, 
yet whenever I came to look about me in 
the ship, it seemed against all 
warrantry to cherish such emotions. For 
though the harpooneers, with the great 
body of the crew, were a far more 
barbaric, heathenish, and motley set 
than any of the tame merchant-ship 
companies which my previous experiences 
had made me acquainted with, still I 
ascribed this—and rightly ascribed 
it—to the fierce uniqueness of the very 
nature of that wild Scandinavian 
vocation in which I had so abandonedly 
embarked. But it was especially the 
aspect of the three chief officers of 
the ship, the mates, which was most 
forcibly calculated to allay these 
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, a Cape man. 
Now, it being Christmas when the ship 
shot from out her harbor, for a space 
we had biting Polar weather, though all 
the time running away from it to the 
southward; and by every degree and 
minute of latitude which we sailed, 
gradually leaving that merciless 
winter, and all its intolerable weather 
behind us. It was one of those less 
lowering, but still grey and gloomy 
enough mornings of the transition, when 
with a fair wind the ship was rushing 
through the water with a vindictive 
sort of leaping and melancholy 
rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck 
at the call of the forenoon watch, so 
soon as I levelled my glance towards 
the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran 
over me. Reality outran apprehension; 
Captain Ahab stood upon his 
quarter-deck.

There seemed no sign of common bodily 
illness about him, nor of the recovery 
from any. He looked like a man cut away 
from the stake, when the fire has 
overrunningly wasted all the limbs 
without consuming them, or taking away 
one particle from their compacted aged 
robustness. His whole high, broad form, 
seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped 
in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s 
cast Perseus. Threading its way out 
from among his grey hairs, and 
continuing right down one side of his 
tawny scorched face and neck, till it 
disappeared in his clothing, you saw a 
slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. 
It resembled that perpendicular seam 
sometimes made in the straight, lofty 
trunk of a great tree, when the upper 
lightning tearingly darts down it, and 
without wrenching a single twig, peels 
and grooves out the bark from top to 
bottom, ere running off into the soil, 
leaving the tree still greenly alive, 
but branded. Whether that mark was born 
with him, or whether it was the scar 
left by some desperate wound, no one 
could certainly say. By some tacit 
consent, throughout the voyage little 
or no allusion was made to it, 
especially by the mates. But once 
Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head 
Indian among the crew, superstitiously 
asserted that not till he was full 
forty years old did Ahab become that 
way branded, and then it came upon him, 
not in the fury of any mortal fray, but 
in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, 
this wild hint seemed inferentially 
negatived, by what a grey Manxman 
insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, 
having never before sailed out of 
Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye 
upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old 
sea-traditions, the immemorial 
credulities, popularly invested this 
old Manxman with preternatural powers 
of discernment. So that no white sailor 
seriously contradicted him when he said 
that if ever Captain Ahab should be 
tranquilly laid out—which might hardly 
come to pass, so he muttered—then, 
whoever should do that last office for 
the dead, would find a birth-mark on 
him from crown to sole.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect 
of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand 
which streaked it, that for the first 
few moments I hardly noted that not a 
little of this overbearing grimness was 
owing to the barbaric white leg upon 
which he partly stood. It had 
previously come to me that this ivory 
leg had at sea been fashioned from the 
polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. 
“Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said 
the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like 
his dismasted craft, he shipped another 
mast without coming home for it. He has 
a quiver of ‘em.”

I was struck with the singular posture 
he maintained. Upon each side of the 
Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close 
to the mizzen shrouds, there was an 
auger hole, bored about half an inch or 
so, into the plank. His bone leg 
steadied in that hole; one arm 
elevated, and holding by a shroud; 
Captain Ahab stood erect, looking 
straight out beyond the ship’s 
ever-pitching prow. There was an 
infinity of firmest fortitude, a 
determinate, unsurrenderable 
wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, 
forward dedication of that glance. Not 
a word he spoke; nor did his officers 
say aught to him; though by all their 
minutest gestures and expressions, they 
plainly showed the uneasy, if not 
painful, consciousness of being under a 
troubled master-eye. And not only that, 
but moody stricken Ahab stood before 
them with a crucifixion in his face; in 
all the nameless regal overbearing 
dignity of some mighty woe.

Ere long, from his first visit in the 
air, he withdrew into his cabin. But 
after that morning, he was every day 
visible to the crew; either standing in 
his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory 
stool he had; or heavily walking the 
deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; 
indeed, began to grow a little genial, 
he became still less and less a 
recluse; as if, when the ship had 
sailed from home, nothing but the dead 
wintry bleakness of the sea had then 
kept him so secluded. And, by and by, 
it came to pass, that he was almost 
continually in the air; but, as yet, 
for all that he said, or perceptibly 
did, on the at last sunny deck, he 
seemed as unnecessary there as another 
mast. But the Pequod was only making a 
passage now; not regularly cruising; 
nearly all whaling preparatives needing 
supervision the mates were fully 
competent to, so that there was little 
or nothing, out of himself, to employ 
or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase 
away, for that one interval, the clouds 
that layer upon layer were piled upon 
his brow, as ever all clouds choose the 
loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, 
warbling persuasiveness of the 
pleasant, holiday weather we came to, 
seemed gradually to charm him from his 
mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, 
dancing girls, April and May, trip home 
to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even 
the barest, ruggedest, most 
thunder-cloven old oak will at least 
send forth some few green sprouts, to 
welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so 
Ahab did, in the end, a little respond 
to the playful allurings of that 
girlish air. More than once did he put 
forth the faint blossom of a look, 
which, in any other man, would have 
soon flowered out in a smile. 

 

CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.

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.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the 
longer linked with life, the less man 
has to do with aught that looks like 
death. Among sea-commanders, the old 
greybeards will oftenest leave their 
berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. 
It was so with Ahab; only that now, 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 old 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 aint 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, tell me that of a morning he 
always finds the old man’s hammock 
clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and 
the sheets down at the foot, and the 
coverlid almost tied into knots, and 
the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as 
though a baked brick had been on it? A 
hot old man! I guess he’s got what some 
folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a 
kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse 
nor a toothache. 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—Here goes 
for a snooze. Damn me, it’s worth a 
fellow’s while to be born into the 
world, if only to fall right asleep. 
And now that I think of it, that’s 
about the first thing babies do, and 
that’s a sort of queer, too. 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 again. 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! He might as well have 
kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he 
did kick me, and I didn’t observe it, I 
was so taken all aback with his brow, 
somehow. It flashed like a bleached 
bone. What the devil’s the matter with 
me? I don’t stand right on my legs. 
Coming afoul of that old man has a sort 
of turned me wrong side out. By the 
Lord, I must have been dreaming, 
though—How? how? how?—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.” 

 

CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.

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 narwhale. 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 iron-grey 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. 

 

CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.

Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.

“Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never 
had. You know the old man’s ivory leg, 
well I dreamed he kicked me with it; 
and when I tried to kick back, upon my 
soul, my little man, I kicked my leg 
right off! And then, presto! Ahab 
seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing 
fool, kept kicking at it. But what was 
still more curious, Flask—you know how 
curious all dreams are—through all this 
rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to 
be thinking to myself, that after all, 
it was not much of an insult, that kick 
from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the 
row? It’s not a real leg, only a false 
leg.’ And there’s a mighty difference 
between a living thump and a dead 
thump. That’s what makes a blow from 
the hand, Flask, fifty times more 
savage to bear than a blow from a cane. 
The living member—that makes the living 
insult, my little man. And thinks I to 
myself all the while, mind, while I was 
stubbing my silly toes against that 
cursed pyramid—so confoundedly 
contradictory was it all, all the 
while, I say, I was thinking to myself, 
‘what’s his leg now, but a cane—a 
whalebone cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it was 
only a playful cudgelling—in fact, only 
a whaleboning that he gave me—not a 
base kick. Besides,’ thinks I, ‘look at 
it once; why, the end of it—the foot 
part—what a small sort of end it is; 
whereas, if a broad footed farmer 
kicked me, there’s a devilish broad 
insult. But this insult is whittled 
down to a point only.’ But now comes 
the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. 
While I was battering away at the 
pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old 
merman, with a hump on his back, takes 
me by the shoulders, and slews me 
round. ‘What are you ‘bout?’ says he. 
Slid! man, but I was frightened. Such a 
phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was 
over the fright. ‘What am I about?’ 
says I at last. ‘And what business is 
that of yours, I should like to know, 
Mr. Humpback? Do you want a kick?’ By 
the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said 
that, than he turned round his stern to 
me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of 
seaweed he had for a clout—what do you 
think, I saw?—why thunder alive, man, 
his stern was stuck full of 
marlinspikes, with the points out. Says 
I, on second thoughts, ‘I guess I won’t 
kick you, old fellow.’ ‘Wise Stubb,’ 
said he, ‘wise Stubb;’ and kept 
muttering it all the time, a sort of 
eating of his own gums like a chimney 
hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to stop 
saying over his ‘wise Stubb, wise 
Stubb,’ I thought I might as well fall 
to kicking the pyramid again. But I had 
only just lifted my foot for it, when 
he roared out, ‘Stop that kicking!’ 
‘Halloa,’ says I, ‘what’s the matter 
now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye here,’ says 
he; ‘let’s argue the insult. Captain 
Ahab kicked ye, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he 
did,’ says I—‘right here it was.’ ‘Very 
good,’ says he—‘he used his ivory leg, 
didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I. 
‘Well then,’ says he, ‘wise Stubb, what 
have you to complain of? Didn’t he kick 
with right good will? it wasn’t a 
common pitch pine leg he kicked with, 
was it? No, you were kicked by a great 
man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, 
Stubb. It’s an honour; I consider it an 
honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old 
England the greatest lords think it 
great glory to be slapped by a queen, 
and made garter-knights of; but, be 
your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked 
by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. 
Remember what I say; be kicked by him; 
account his kicks honours; and on no 
account kick back; for you can’t help 
yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t you see 
that pyramid?’ With that, he all of a 
sudden seemed somehow, in some queer 
fashion, to swim off into the air. I 
snored; rolled over; and there I was in 
my hammock! Now, what do you think of 
that dream, Flask?”

“I don’t know; it seems a sort of 
foolish to me, tho.’”

“May be; may be. But it’s made a wise 
man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab 
standing there, sideways looking over 
the stern? Well, the best thing you can 
do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; 
never speak to him, whatever he says. 
Halloa! What’s that he shouts? Hark!”

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

“If ye see a white one, split your 
lungs for him!

“What do you think of that now, Flask? 
ain’t there a small drop of something 
queer about that, eh? A white whale—did 
ye mark that, man? Look ye—there’s 
something special in the wind. Stand by 
for it, Flask. Ahab has that that’s 
bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes 
this way.” 

 

CHAPTER 32. Cetology.

Already we are boldly launched upon the 
deep; but soon we shall be lost in its 
unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere 
that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s 
weedy hull rolls side by side with the 
barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at 
the outset it is but well to attend to 
a matter almost indispensable to a 
thorough appreciative understanding of 
the more special leviathanic 
revelations and allusions of all sorts 
which are to follow.

It is some systematized exhibition of 
the whale 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.

“No branch of Zoology is so much 
involved as that which is entitled 
Cetology,” says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 
1820.

“It is not my intention, were it in my 
power, to enter into the inquiry as to 
the true method of dividing the cetacea 
into groups and families.... Utter 
confusion exists among the historians 
of this animal” (sperm whale), says 
Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.

“Unfitness to pursue our research in 
the unfathomable waters.” “Impenetrable 
veil covering our knowledge of the 
cetacea.” “A field strewn with thorns.” 
“All these incomplete indications but 
serve to torture us naturalists.”

Thus speak of the whale, the great 
Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, 
those lights of zoology and anatomy. 
Nevertheless, though of real knowledge 
there be little, yet of books there are 
a plenty; and so in some small degree, 
with cetology, or the science of 
whales. Many are the men, small and 
great, old and new, landsmen and 
seamen, who have at large or in little, 
written of the whale. Run over a 
few:—The Authors of the Bible; 
Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir 
Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; 
Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; 
Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; 
Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; 
Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; 
Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross 
Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; 
Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But 
to what ultimate generalizing purpose 
all these have written, the above cited 
extracts will show.

Of the names in this list of whale 
authors, only those following Owen ever 
saw living whales; and but one of them 
was a real professional harpooneer and 
whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On 
the separate subject of the Greenland 
or right-whale, he is the best existing 
authority. But Scoresby knew nothing 
and says nothing of the great sperm 
whale, compared with which the 
Greenland whale is almost unworthy 
mentioning. And here be it said, that 
the Greenland whale is an usurper upon 
the throne of the seas. He is not even 
by any means the largest of the whales. 
Yet, owing to the long priority of his 
claims, and the profound ignorance 
which, till some seventy years back, 
invested the then fabulous or utterly 
unknown sperm-whale, and which 
ignorance to this present day still 
reigns in all but some few scientific 
retreats and whale-ports; this 
usurpation has been every way complete. 
Reference to nearly all the leviathanic 
allusions in the great poets of past 
days, will satisfy you that the 
Greenland whale, without one rival, was 
to them the monarch of the seas. But 
the time has at last come for a new 
proclamation. This is Charing Cross; 
hear ye! good people all,—the Greenland 
whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale 
now reigneth!

There are only two books in being which 
at all pretend to put the living sperm 
whale before you, and at the same time, 
in the remotest degree succeed in the 
attempt. Those books are Beale’s and 
Bennett’s; both in their time surgeons 
to English South-Sea whale-ships, and 
both exact and reliable men. The 
original matter touching the sperm 
whale to be found in their volumes is 
necessarily small; but so far as it 
goes, it is of excellent quality, 
though mostly confined to scientific 
description. As yet, however, the sperm 
whale, scientific or poetic, lives not 
complete in any literature. Far above 
all other hunted whales, his is an 
unwritten life.

Now the various species of whales need 
some sort of popular comprehensive 
classification, if only an easy outline 
one 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 project the draught of a 
systematization of cetology. 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 sea after them; to have 
one’s hands among the unspeakable 
foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of 
the world; this is a fearful thing. 
What am I that I should essay to hook 
the nose of this leviathan! The awful 
tauntings in Job might well appal me. 
Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant 
with thee? Behold the hope of him is 
vain! But I have swam through libraries 
and sailed through oceans; I have had 
to do with whales with these visible 
hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. 
There are some preliminaries to settle.

First: The uncertain, unsettled 
condition of this science of Cetology 
is in the very vestibule attested by 
the fact, that in some quarters it 
still remains a moot point whether a 
whale be a fish. In his System of 
Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, 
“I hereby separate the whales from the 
fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know 
that down to the year 1850, sharks and 
shad, alewives and herring, against 
Linnaeus’s express edict, were still 
found dividing the possession of the 
same seas with the Leviathan.

The grounds upon which Linnaeus would 
fain have banished the whales from the 
waters, he states as follows: “On 
account of their warm bilocular heart, 
their lungs, their movable eyelids, 
their hollow ears, penem intrantem 
feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, 
“ex lege naturae jure meritoque.” I 
submitted all this to my friends Simeon 
Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, 
both messmates of mine in a certain 
voyage, and they united in the opinion 
that the reasons set forth were 
altogether insufficient. Charley 
profanely hinted they were humbug.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, 
I take the good old fashioned ground 
that the whale is a fish, and call upon 
holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental 
thing settled, the next point is, in 
what internal respect does the whale 
differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus 
has given you those items. But in 
brief, they are these: lungs and warm 
blood; whereas, all other fish are 
lungless and cold blooded.

Next: how shall we define the whale, by 
his obvious externals, so as 
conspicuously to label him for all time 
to come? To be short, then, a whale is 
a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. 
There you have him. However contracted, 
that definition is the result of 
expanded meditation. A walrus spouts 
much like a whale, but the walrus is 
not a fish, because he is amphibious. 
But the last term of the definition is 
still more cogent, as coupled with the 
first. Almost any one must have noticed 
that all the fish familiar to landsmen 
have not a flat, but a vertical, or 
up-and-down tail. Whereas, among 
spouting fish the tail, though it may 
be similarly shaped, invariably assumes 
a horizontal position.

By the above definition of what a whale 
is, I do by no means exclude from the 
leviathanic brotherhood any sea 
creature hitherto identified with the 
whale by the best informed 
Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand, 
link with it any fish hitherto 
authoritatively regarded as alien.* 
Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and 
horizontal tailed fish must be included 
in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, 
then, come the grand divisions of the 
entire whale host.

*I am aware that down to the present 
time, the fish styled Lamatins and 
Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the 
Coffins of Nantucket) are included by 
many naturalists among the whales. But 
as these pig-fish are a noisy, 
contemptible set, mostly lurking in the 
mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet 
hay, and especially as they do not 
spout, I deny their credentials as 
whales; and have presented them with 
their passports to quit the Kingdom of 
Cetology.

First: According to magnitude I divide 
the whales into three primary BOOKS 
(subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these 
shall comprehend them all, both small 
and large.

I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO 
WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.

As the type of the FOLIO I present the 
Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO, the 
Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.

FOLIOS. Among these I here include the 
following chapters:—I. The Sperm Whale; 
II. the Right Whale; III. the Fin-Back 
Whale; IV. the Hump-backed Whale; V. 
the Razor-Back Whale; VI. the 
Sulphur-Bottom Whale.

BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER I. (Sperm 
Whale).—This whale, among the English 
of old vaguely known as the Trumpa 
whale, and the Physeter whale, and the 
Anvil Headed whale, is the present 
Cachalot of the French, and the 
Pottsfich of the Germans, and the 
Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, 
without doubt, the largest inhabitant 
of the globe; the most formidable of 
all whales to encounter; the most 
majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far 
the most valuable in commerce; he being 
the only creature from which that 
valuable substance, spermaceti, is 
obtained. All his peculiarities will, 
in many other places, be enlarged upon. 
It is chiefly with his name that I now 
have to do. Philologically considered, 
it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when 
the Sperm whale was almost wholly 
unknown in his own proper 
individuality, and when his oil was 
only accidentally obtained from the 
stranded fish; in those days 
spermaceti, it would seem, was 
popularly supposed to be derived from a 
creature identical with the one then 
known in England as the Greenland or 
Right Whale. It was the idea also, that 
this same spermaceti was that 
quickening humor of the Greenland Whale 
which the first syllable of the word 
literally expresses. In those times, 
also, spermaceti was exceedingly 
scarce, not being used for light, but 
only as an ointment and medicament. It 
was only to be had from the druggists 
as you nowadays buy an ounce of 
rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the 
course of time, the true nature of 
spermaceti became known, its original 
name was still retained by the dealers; 
no doubt to enhance its value by a 
notion so strangely significant of its 
scarcity. And so the appellation must 
at last have come to be bestowed upon 
the whale from which this spermaceti 
was really derived.

BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER II. (Right 
Whale).—In one respect this is the most 
venerable of the leviathans, being the 
one first regularly hunted by man. It 
yields the article commonly known as 
whalebone or baleen; and the oil 
specially known as “whale oil,” an 
inferior article in commerce. Among the 
fishermen, he is indiscriminately 
designated by all the following titles: 
The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the 
Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True 
Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal 
of obscurity concerning the identity of 
the species thus multitudinously 
baptised. What then is the whale, which 
I include in the second species of my 
Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of 
the English naturalists; the Greenland 
Whale of the English whalemen; the 
Baleine Ordinaire of the French 
whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the 
Swedes. It is the whale which for more 
than two centuries past has been hunted 
by the Dutch and English in the Arctic 
seas; it is the whale which the 
American fishermen have long pursued in 
the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, 
on the Nor’ West Coast, and various 
other parts of the world, designated by 
them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.

Some pretend to see a difference 
between the Greenland whale of the 
English and the right whale of the 
Americans. 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 
distinction. It is by endless 
subdivisions based upon the most 
inconclusive differences, that some 
departments of natural history become 
so repellingly intricate. The right 
whale will be elsewhere treated of at 
some length, with reference to 
elucidating the sperm whale.

BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER III. 
(Fin-Back).—Under this head I reckon a 
monster which, by the various names of 
Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, 
has been seen almost in every sea and 
is commonly the whale whose distant jet 
is so often descried by passengers 
crossing the Atlantic, in the New York 
packet-tracks. In the length he 
attains, and in his baleen, the 
Fin-back resembles the right whale, but 
is of a less portly girth, and a 
lighter colour, approaching to olive. 
His great lips present a cable-like 
aspect, formed by the intertwisting, 
slanting folds of large wrinkles. His 
grand distinguishing feature, the fin, 
from which he derives his name, is 
often a conspicuous object. This fin is 
some three or four feet long, growing 
vertically from the hinder part of the 
back, of an angular shape, and with a 
very sharp pointed end. Even if not the 
slightest other part of the creature be 
visible, this isolated fin will, at 
times, be seen plainly projecting from 
the surface. When the sea is moderately 
calm, and slightly marked with 
spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like 
fin stands up and casts shadows upon 
the wrinkled surface, it may well be 
supposed that the watery circle 
surrounding it somewhat resembles a 
dial, with its style and wavy 
hour-lines graved on it. On that 
Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. 
The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He 
seems a whale-hater, as some men are 
man-haters. Very shy; always going 
solitary; unexpectedly rising to the 
surface in the remotest and most sullen 
waters; his straight and single lofty 
jet rising like a tall misanthropic 
spear upon a barren plain; gifted with 
such wondrous power and velocity in 
swimming, as to defy all present 
pursuit from man; this leviathan seems 
the banished and unconquerable Cain of 
his race, bearing for his mark that 
style upon his back. From having the 
baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is 
sometimes included with the right 
whale, among a theoretic species 
denominated Whalebone Whales, that is, 
whales with baleen. Of these so called 
Whalebone whales, there would seem to 
be several varieties, most of which, 
however, are little known. Broad-nosed 
whales and beaked whales; pike-headed 
whales; bunched whales; under-jawed 
whales and rostrated whales, are the 
fishermen’s names for a few sorts.

In connection with this appellative of 
“Whalebone whales,” it is of great 
importance to mention, that however 
such a nomenclature may be convenient 
in facilitating allusions to some kind 
of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt 
a clear classification of the 
Leviathan, founded upon either his 
baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; 
notwithstanding that those marked parts 
or features very obviously seem better 
adapted to afford the basis for a 
regular system of Cetology than any 
other detached bodily distinctions, 
which the whale, in his kinds, 
presents. How then? The baleen, hump, 
back-fin, and teeth; these are things 
whose peculiarities are 
indiscriminately dispersed among all 
sorts of whales, without any regard to 
what may be the nature of their 
structure in other and more essential 
particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and 
the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; 
but there the similitude ceases. Then, 
this same humpbacked whale and the 
Greenland whale, each of these has 
baleen; but there again the similitude 
ceases. And it is just the same with 
the other parts above mentioned. In 
various sorts of whales, 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 whale-naturalists has split.

But it may possibly be conceived that, 
in the internal parts of the whale, in 
his anatomy—there, at least, we shall 
be able to hit the right 
classification. Nay; what thing, for 
example, is there in the Greenland 
whale’s anatomy more striking than his 
baleen? Yet we have seen that by his 
baleen it is impossible correctly to 
classify the Greenland whale. And if 
you descend into the bowels of the 
various leviathans, why there you will 
not find distinctions a fiftieth part 
as available to the systematizer as 
those external ones already enumerated. 
What then remains? nothing but to take 
hold of the whales bodily, in their 
entire liberal volume, and boldly sort 
them that way. And this is the 
Bibliographical system here adopted; 
and it is the only one that can 
possibly succeed, for it alone is 
practicable. To proceed.

BOOK I. (Folio) CHAPTER IV. 
(Hump-Back).—This whale is often seen 
on the northern American coast. He has 
been frequently captured there, and 
towed into harbor. He has a great pack 
on him like a peddler; or you might 
call him the Elephant and Castle whale. 
At any rate, the popular name for him 
does not sufficiently distinguish him, 
since the sperm whale also has a hump 
though a smaller one. His oil is not 
very valuable. He has baleen. He is the 
most gamesome and light-hearted of all 
the whales, making more gay foam and 
white water generally than any other of 
them.

BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER V. 
(Razor-Back).—Of this whale little is 
known but his name. I have seen him at 
a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring 
nature, he eludes both hunters and 
philosophers. Though no coward, he has 
never yet shown any part of him but his 
back, which rises in a long sharp 
ridge. Let him go. I know little more 
of him, nor does anybody else.

BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER VI. 
(Sulphur-Bottom).—Another retiring 
gentleman, with a brimstone belly, 
doubtless got by scraping along the 
Tartarian tiles in some of his 
profounder divings. He is seldom seen; 
at least I have never seen him except 
in the remoter southern seas, and then 
always at too great a distance to study 
his countenance. He is never chased; he 
would run away with rope-walks of line. 
Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, 
Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more 
that is true of ye, nor can the oldest 
Nantucketer.

Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now 
begins BOOK II. (Octavo).

OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of 
middling magnitude, among which present 
may be numbered:—I., the Grampus; II., 
the Black Fish; III., the Narwhale; 
IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.

*Why this book of whales is not 
denominated the Quarto is very plain. 
Because, while the whales of this 
order, though smaller than those of the 
former order, nevertheless retain a 
proportionate likeness to them in 
figure, yet the bookbinder’s Quarto 
volume in its dimensioned form does not 
preserve the shape of the Folio volume, 
but the Octavo volume does.

BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER I. 
(Grampus).—Though this fish, whose loud 
sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, 
has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is 
so well known a denizen of the deep, 
yet is he not popularly classed among 
whales. But possessing all the grand 
distinctive features of the leviathan, 
most naturalists have recognised him 
for one. He is of moderate octavo size, 
varying from fifteen to twenty-five 
feet in length, and of corresponding 
dimensions round the waist. He swims in 
herds; he is never regularly hunted, 
though his oil is considerable in 
quantity, and pretty good for light. By 
some fishermen his approach is regarded 
as premonitory of the advance of the 
great sperm whale.

BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER II. (Black 
Fish).—I give the popular fishermen’s 
names for all these fish, for generally 
they are the best. Where any name 
happens to be vague or inexpressive, I 
shall say so, and suggest another. I do 
so now, touching the Black Fish, 
so-called, because blackness is the 
rule among almost all whales. So, call 
him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His 
voracity is well known, and from the 
circumstance that the inner angles of 
his lips are curved upwards, he carries 
an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on 
his face. This whale averages some 
sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He 
is found in almost all latitudes. He 
has a peculiar way of showing his 
dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which 
looks something like a Roman nose. When 
not more profitably employed, the sperm 
whale hunters sometimes capture the 
Hyena whale, to keep up the supply of 
cheap oil for domestic employment—as 
some frugal housekeepers, in the 
absence of company, and quite alone by 
themselves, burn unsavory tallow 
instead of odorous wax. Though their 
blubber is very thin, some of these 
whales will yield you upwards of thirty 
gallons of oil.

BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER III. 
(Narwhale), that is, Nostril 
whale.—Another instance of a curiously 
named whale, so named I suppose from 
his peculiar horn being originally 
mistaken for a peaked nose. The 
creature is some sixteen feet in 
length, while its horn averages five 
feet, though some exceed ten, and even 
attain to fifteen feet. Strictly 
speaking, this horn is but a lengthened 
tusk, growing out from the jaw in a 
line a little depressed from the 
horizontal. But it is only found on the 
sinister side, which has an ill effect, 
giving its owner something analogous to 
the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. 
What precise purpose this ivory horn or 
lance answers, it would be hard to say. 
It does not seem to be used like the 
blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish; 
though some sailors tell me that the 
Narwhale employs it for a rake in 
turning over the bottom of the sea for 
food. Charley Coffin said it was used 
for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, 
rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, 
and finding it sheeted with ice, 
thrusts his horn up, and so breaks 
through. But you cannot prove either of 
these surmises to be correct. My own 
opinion is, that however this one-sided 
horn may really be used by the 
Narwhale—however that may be—it would 
certainly be very convenient to him for 
a folder in reading pamphlets. The 
Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked 
whale, the Horned whale, and the 
Unicorn whale. He is certainly a 
curious example of the Unicornism to be 
found in almost every kingdom of 
animated nature. From certain 
cloistered old authors I have gathered 
that this same sea-unicorn’s horn was 
in ancient days regarded as the great 
antidote against poison, and as such, 
preparations of it brought immense 
prices. It was also distilled to a 
volatile salts for fainting ladies, the 
same way that the horns of the male 
deer are manufactured into hartshorn. 
Originally it was in itself accounted 
an object of great curiosity. Black 
Letter tells me that Sir Martin 
Frobisher on his return from that 
voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly 
wave her jewelled hand to him from a 
window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold 
ship sailed down the Thames; “when Sir 
Martin returned from that voyage,” 
saith Black Letter, “on bended knees he 
presented to her highness a prodigious 
long horn of the Narwhale, which for a 
long period after hung in the castle at 
Windsor.” An Irish author avers that 
the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, 
did likewise present to her highness 
another horn, pertaining to a land 
beast of the unicorn nature.

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, 
leopard-like look, being of a 
milk-white ground colour, dotted with 
round and oblong spots of black. His 
oil is very superior, clear and fine; 
but there is little of it, and he is 
seldom hunted. He is mostly found in 
the circumpolar seas.

BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER IV. 
(Killer).—Of this whale little is 
precisely known to the Nantucketer, and 
nothing at all to the professed 
naturalist. From what I have seen of 
him at a distance, I should say that he 
was about the bigness of a grampus. He 
is very savage—a sort of Feegee fish. 
He sometimes takes the great Folio 
whales by the lip, and hangs there like 
a leech, till the mighty brute is 
worried to death. The Killer is never 
hunted. I never heard what sort of oil 
he has. Exception might be taken to the 
name bestowed upon this whale, on the 
ground of its indistinctness. For we 
are all killers, on land and on sea; 
Bonapartes and Sharks included.

BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER V. 
(Thrasher).—This gentleman is famous 
for his tail, which he uses for a 
ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts 
the Folio whale’s back, and as he 
swims, he works his passage by flogging 
him; as some schoolmasters get along in 
the world by a similar process. Still 
less is known of the Thrasher than of 
the Killer. Both are outlaws, even in 
the lawless seas.

Thus ends BOOK II. (Octavo), and begins 
BOOK III. (Duodecimo).

DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller 
whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise. II. The 
Algerine Porpoise. III. The 
Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.

To those who have not chanced specially 
to study the subject, it may possibly 
seem strange, that fishes not commonly 
exceeding four or five feet should be 
marshalled among WHALES—a word, which, 
in the popular sense, always conveys an 
idea of hugeness. But the creatures set 
down above as Duodecimoes are 
infallibly whales, by the terms of my 
definition of what a whale is—i.e. a 
spouting fish, with a horizontal tail.

BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER 1. 
(Huzza Porpoise).—This is the common 
porpoise found almost all over the 
globe. The name is of my own bestowal; 
for there are more than one sort of 
porpoises, and something must be done 
to distinguish them. I call him thus, 
because he always swims in hilarious 
shoals, which upon the broad sea keep 
tossing themselves to heaven like caps 
in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their 
appearance is generally hailed with 
delight by the mariner. Full of fine 
spirits, they invariably come from the 
breezy billows to windward. They are 
the lads that always live before the 
wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. 
If you yourself can withstand three 
cheers at beholding these vivacious 
fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit 
of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A 
well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will 
yield you one good gallon of good oil. 
But the fine and delicate fluid 
extracted from his jaws is exceedingly 
valuable. It is in request among 
jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put 
it on their hones. Porpoise meat is 
good eating, you know. It may never 
have occurred to you that a porpoise 
spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small 
that it is not very readily 
discernible. But the next time you have 
a chance, watch him; and you will then 
see the great Sperm whale himself in 
miniature.

BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER II. 
(Algerine Porpoise).—A pirate. Very 
savage. He is only found, I think, in 
the Pacific. He is somewhat larger than 
the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the 
same general make. Provoke him, and he 
will buckle to a shark. I have lowered 
for him many times, but never yet saw 
him captured.

BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER III. 
(Mealy-mouthed Porpoise).—The largest 
kind of Porpoise; and only found in the 
Pacific, so far as it is known. The 
only English name, by which he has 
hitherto been designated, is that of 
the fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from 
the circumstance that he is chiefly 
found in the vicinity of that Folio. In 
shape, he differs in some degree from 
the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less 
rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is 
of quite a neat and gentleman-like 
figure. He has no fins on his back 
(most other porpoises have), he has a 
lovely tail, and sentimental Indian 
eyes of a hazel hue. But his 
mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his 
entire back down to his side fins is of 
a deep sable, yet a boundary line, 
distinct as the mark in a ship’s hull, 
called the “bright waist,” that line 
streaks him from stem to stern, with 
two separate colours, black above and 
white below. The white comprises part 
of his head, and the whole of his 
mouth, which makes him look as if he 
had just escaped from a felonious visit 
to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy 
aspect! His oil is much like that of 
the common porpoise.

Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does 
not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise 
is the smallest of the whales. Above, 
you have all the Leviathans of note. 
But there are a rabble of uncertain, 
fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, 
as an American whaleman, I know by 
reputation, but not personally. I shall 
enumerate them by their fore-castle 
appellations; for possibly such a list 
may be valuable to future 
investigators, who may complete what I 
have here but begun. If any of the 
following whales, shall hereafter be 
caught and marked, then he can readily 
be incorporated into this System, 
according to his Folio, Octavo, or 
Duodecimo magnitude:—The Bottle-Nose 
Whale; the Junk Whale; the 
Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; 
the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; 
the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; 
the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; 
the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. 
From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English 
authorities, there might be quoted 
other lists of uncertain whales, 
blessed with all manner of uncouth 
names. But I omit them as altogether 
obsolete; and can hardly help 
suspecting them for mere sounds, full 
of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.

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 cetological 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 draught—nay, but the draught of a 
draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and 
Patience! 

 

CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.

Concerning the officers of the 
whale-craft, this seems as good a place 
as any to set down a little domestic 
peculiarity on ship-board, arising from 
the existence of the harpooneer class 
of officers, a class unknown of course 
in any other marine than the 
whale-fleet.

The large importance attached to the 
harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by the 
fact, that originally in the old Dutch 
Fishery, two centuries and more ago, 
the command of a whale ship was not 
wholly lodged in the person now called 
the captain, but was divided between 
him and an officer called the 
Specksnyder. Literally this word means 
Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time 
made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. 
In those days, the captain’s authority 
was restricted to the navigation and 
general management of the vessel; while 
over the whale-hunting department and 
all its concerns, the Specksnyder or 
Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In 
the British Greenland Fishery, under 
the corrupted title of Specksioneer, 
this old Dutch official is still 
retained, but his former dignity is 
sadly abridged. At present he ranks 
simply as senior Harpooneer; and as 
such, is but one of the captain’s more 
inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as 
upon the good conduct of the 
harpooneers the success of a whaling 
voyage largely depends, and since in 
the American Fishery he is not only an 
important officer in the boat, but 
under certain circumstances (night 
watches on a whaling ground) the 
command of the ship’s deck is also his; 
therefore the grand political maxim of 
the sea demands, that he should 
nominally live apart from the men 
before the mast, and be in some way 
distinguished as their professional 
superior; though always, by them, 
familiarly regarded as their social 
equal.

Now, the grand distinction drawn 
between officer and man at sea, is 
this—the first lives aft, the last 
forward. Hence, in whale-ships and 
merchantmen alike, the mates have their 
quarters with the captain; and so, too, 
in most of the American whalers the 
harpooneers are lodged in the after 
part of the ship. That is to say, they 
take their meals in the captain’s 
cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly 
communicating with it.

Though the long period of a Southern 
whaling voyage (by far the longest of 
all voyages now or ever made by man), 
the peculiar perils of it, and the 
community of interest prevailing among 
a company, all of whom, high or low, 
depend for their profits, not upon 
fixed wages, but upon their common 
luck, together with their common 
vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; 
though all these things do in some 
cases tend to beget a less rigorous 
discipline than in merchantmen 
generally; yet, never mind how much 
like an old Mesopotamian family these 
whalemen may, in some primitive 
instances, live together; for all that, 
the punctilious externals, at least, of 
the quarter-deck are seldom materially 
relaxed, and in no instance done away. 
Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in 
which you will see the skipper parading 
his quarter-deck with an elated 
grandeur not surpassed in any military 
navy; nay, extorting almost as much 
outward homage as if he wore the 
imperial purple, and not the shabbiest 
of pilot-cloth.

And though of all men the moody captain 
of the Pequod was the least given to 
that sort of shallowest assumption; and 
though the only homage he ever exacted, 
was implicit, instantaneous obedience; 
though he required no man to remove the 
shoes from his feet ere stepping upon 
the quarter-deck; and though there were 
times when, owing to peculiar 
circumstances connected with events 
hereafter to be detailed, he addressed 
them in unusual terms, whether of 
condescension or in terrorem, or 
otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by 
no means unobservant of the paramount 
forms and usages of the sea.

Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be 
eventually perceived, that behind those 
forms and usages, as it were, he 
sometimes masked himself; incidentally 
making use of them for other and more 
private ends than they were 
legitimately intended to subserve. That 
certain sultanism of his brain, which 
had otherwise in a good degree remained 
unmanifested; through those forms that 
same sultanism became incarnate in an 
irresistible dictatorship. For be a 
man’s intellectual superiority what it 
will, it can never assume the 
practical, available supremacy over 
other men, without the aid of some sort 
of external arts and entrenchments, 
always, in themselves, more or less 
paltry and base. This it is, that for 
ever keeps God’s true princes of the 
Empire from the world’s hustings; and 
leaves the highest honours that this 
air can give, to those men who become 
famous more through their infinite 
inferiority to the choice hidden 
handful of the Divine Inert, than 
through their undoubted superiority 
over the dead level of the mass. Such 
large virtue lurks in these small 
things when extreme political 
superstitions invest them, that in some 
royal instances even to idiot 
imbecility they have imparted potency. 
But when, as in the case of Nicholas 
the Czar, the ringed crown of 
geographical empire encircles an 
imperial brain; then, the plebeian 
herds crouch abased before the 
tremendous centralization. Nor, will 
the tragic dramatist who would depict 
mortal indomitableness in its fullest 
sweep and direct swing, ever forget a 
hint, incidentally so important in his 
art, as the one now alluded to.

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves 
before me in all his Nantucket grimness 
and shagginess; and in this episode 
touching Emperors and Kings, I must not 
conceal that I have only to do with a 
poor old whale-hunter like him; and, 
therefore, all 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! 

 

CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.

It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, 
thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face 
from the cabin-scuttle, announces 
dinner to his lord and master; who, 
sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has 
just been taking an observation of the 
sun; and is now mutely reckoning the 
latitude on the smooth, 
medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for 
that daily purpose on the upper part of 
his ivory leg. From his complete 
inattention to the tidings, you would 
think that moody Ahab had not heard his 
menial. But presently, catching hold of 
the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to 
the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated 
voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,” 
disappears into the cabin.

When the last echo of his sultan’s step 
has died away, and Starbuck, the first 
Emir, has every reason to suppose that 
he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from 
his quietude, takes a few turns along 
the planks, and, after a grave peep 
into the binnacle, says, with some 
touch of pleasantness, “Dinner, Mr. 
Stubb,” and descends the scuttle. The 
second Emir lounges about the rigging 
awhile, and then slightly shaking the 
main brace, to see whether it will be 
all right with that important rope, he 
likewise takes up the old burden, and 
with a rapid “Dinner, Mr. Flask,” 
follows after his predecessors.

But the third Emir, now seeing himself 
all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to 
feel relieved from some curious 
restraint; for, tipping all sorts of 
knowing winks in all sorts of 
directions, and kicking off his shoes, 
he strikes into a sharp but noiseless 
squall of a hornpipe right over the 
Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a 
dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up 
into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes 
down rollicking so far at least as he 
remains visible from the deck, 
reversing all other processions, by 
bringing up the rear with music. But 
ere stepping into the cabin doorway 
below, he pauses, ships a new face 
altogether, and, then, independent, 
hilarious little Flask enters King 
Ahab’s presence, in the character of 
Abjectus, or the Slave.

It is not the least among the strange 
things bred by the intense 
artificialness of sea-usages, that 
while in the open air of the deck some 
officers will, upon provocation, bear 
themselves boldly and defyingly enough 
towards their commander; yet, ten to 
one, let those very officers the next 
moment go down to their customary 
dinner in that same commander’s cabin, 
and straightway their inoffensive, not 
to say deprecatory and humble air 
towards him, as he sits at the head of 
the table; this is marvellous, 
sometimes most comical. Wherefore this 
difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To 
have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; 
and to have been Belshazzar, not 
haughtily but courteously, therein 
certainly must have been some touch of 
mundane grandeur. But he who in the 
rightly regal and intelligent spirit 
presides over his own private 
dinner-table of invited guests, that 
man’s unchallenged power and dominion 
of individual influence for the time; 
that man’s royalty of state transcends 
Belshazzar’s, for Belshazzar was not 
the greatest. Who has but once dined 
his friends, has tasted what it is to 
be Caesar. It is a witchery of social 
czarship which there is no 
withstanding. Now, if to this 
consideration you superadd the official 
supremacy of a ship-master, then, by 
inference, you will derive the cause of 
that peculiarity of sea-life just 
mentioned.

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab 
presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on 
the white coral beach, surrounded by 
his warlike but still deferential cubs. 
In his own proper turn, each officer 
waited to be served. They were as 
little children before Ahab; and yet, 
in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the 
smallest social arrogance. With one 
mind, their intent eyes all fastened 
upon the old man’s knife, as he carved 
the chief dish before him. I do not 
suppose that for the world they would 
have profaned that moment with the 
slightest observation, even upon so 
neutral a topic as the weather. No! And 
when reaching out his knife and fork, 
between which the slice of beef was 
locked, Ahab thereby motioned 
Starbuck’s plate towards him, the mate 
received his meat as though receiving 
alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little 
started if, perchance, the knife grazed 
against the plate; and chewed it 
noiselessly; and swallowed it, not 
without circumspection. For, like the 
Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where 
the German Emperor profoundly dines 
with the seven Imperial Electors, so 
these cabin meals were somehow solemn 
meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet 
at table old Ahab forbade not 
conversation; only he himself was dumb. 
What a relief it was to choking Stubb, 
when a rat made a sudden racket in the 
hold below. And poor little Flask, he 
was the youngest son, and little boy of 
this weary family party. His were the 
shinbones of the saline beef; his would 
have been the drumsticks. For Flask to 
have presumed to help himself, this 
must have seemed to him tantamount to 
larceny in the first degree. Had he 
helped himself at that table, 
doubtless, never more would he have 
been able to hold his head up in this 
honest world; nevertheless, strange to 
say, Ahab never forbade him. And had 
Flask helped himself, the chances were 
Ahab had never so much as noticed it. 
Least of all, did Flask presume to help 
himself to butter. Whether he thought 
the owners of the ship denied it to 
him, on account of its clotting his 
clear, sunny complexion; or whether he 
deemed that, on so long a voyage in 
such marketless waters, butter was at a 
premium, and therefore was not for him, 
a subaltern; however it was, Flask, 
alas! was a butterless man!

Another thing. Flask was the last 
person down at the dinner, and Flask is 
the first man up. Consider! For hereby 
Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in 
point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both 
had the start of him; and yet they also 
have the privilege of lounging in the 
rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg 
higher than Flask, happens to have but 
a small appetite, and soon shows 
symptoms of concluding his repast, then 
Flask must bestir himself, he will not 
get more than three mouthfuls that day; 
for it is against holy usage for Stubb 
to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore 
it was that Flask once admitted in 
private, that ever since he had arisen 
to the dignity of an officer, from that 
moment he had never known what it was 
to be otherwise than hungry, more or 
less. For what he ate did not so much 
relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal 
in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought 
Flask, have for ever departed from my 
stomach. I am an officer; but, how I 
wish I could fish a bit of 
old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, 
as I used to when I was before the 
mast. There’s the fruits of promotion 
now; there’s the vanity of glory: 
there’s the insanity of life! Besides, 
if it were so that any mere sailor of 
the Pequod had a grudge against Flask 
in Flask’s official capacity, all that 
sailor had to do, in order to obtain 
ample vengeance, was to go aft at 
dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask 
through the cabin sky-light, sitting 
silly and dumfoundered before awful 
Ahab.

Now, Ahab and his three mates formed 
what may be called the first table in 
the Pequod’s cabin. After their 
departure, taking place in inverted 
order to their arrival, the canvas 
cloth was cleared, or rather was 
restored to some hurried order by the 
pallid steward. And then the three 
harpooneers were bidden to the feast, 
they being its residuary legatees. They 
made a sort of temporary servants’ hall 
of the high and mighty cabin.

In strange contrast to the hardly 
tolerable constraint and nameless 
invisible domineerings of the captain’s 
table, was the entire care-free license 
and ease, the almost frantic democracy 
of those inferior fellows the 
harpooneers. While their masters, the 
mates, seemed afraid of the sound of 
the hinges of their own jaws, the 
harpooneers chewed their food with such 
a relish that there was a report to it. 
They dined like lords; they filled 
their bellies like Indian ships all day 
loading with spices. Such portentous 
appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, 
that to fill out the vacancies made by 
the previous repast, often the pale 
Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great 
baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried 
out of the solid ox. And if he were not 
lively about it, if he did not go with 
a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then 
Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of 
accelerating him by darting a fork at 
his back, harpoon-wise. And once 
Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, 
assisted Dough-Boy’s memory by 
snatching him up bodily, and thrusting 
his head into a great empty wooden 
trencher, while Tashtego, knife in 
hand, began laying out the circle 
preliminary to scalping him. He was 
naturally a very nervous, shuddering 
sort of little fellow, this bread-faced 
steward; the progeny of a bankrupt 
baker and a hospital nurse. And what 
with the standing spectacle of the 
black terrific Ahab, and the periodical 
tumultuous visitations of these three 
savages, Dough-Boy’s whole life was one 
continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after 
seeing the harpooneers furnished with 
all things they demanded, he would 
escape from their clutches into his 
little pantry adjoining, and fearfully 
peep out at them through the blinds of 
its door, till all was over.

It was a sight to see Queequeg seated 
over against Tashtego, opposing his 
filed teeth to the Indian’s: crosswise 
to them, Daggoo seated on the floor, 
for a bench would have brought his 
hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; 
at every motion of his colossal limbs, 
making the low cabin framework to 
shake, as when an African elephant goes 
passenger in a ship. But for all this, 
the great negro was wonderfully 
abstemious, not to say dainty. It 
seemed hardly possible that by such 
comparatively small mouthfuls he could 
keep up the vitality diffused through 
so broad, baronial, and superb a 
person. But, doubtless, this noble 
savage fed strong and drank deep of the 
abounding element of air; and through 
his dilated nostrils snuffed in the 
sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef 
or by bread, are giants made or 
nourished. But Queequeg, he had a 
mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in 
eating—an ugly sound enough—so much so, 
that the trembling Dough-Boy almost 
looked to see whether any marks of 
teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And 
when he would hear Tashtego singing out 
for him to produce himself, that his 
bones might be picked, the 
simple-witted steward all but shattered 
the crockery hanging round him in the 
pantry, by his sudden fits of the 
palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the 
harpooneers carried in their pockets, 
for their lances and other weapons; and 
with which whetstones, at dinner, they 
would ostentatiously sharpen their 
knives; that grating sound did not at 
all tend to tranquillize poor 
Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in 
his Island days, Queequeg, for one, 
must certainly have been guilty of some 
murderous, convivial indiscretions. 
Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white 
waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a 
napkin should he carry on his arm, but 
a buckler. In good time, though, to his 
great delight, the three salt-sea 
warriors would rise and depart; to his 
credulous, fable-mongering ears, all 
their martial bones jingling in them at 
every step, like Moorish scimetars in 
scabbards.

But, though these barbarians dined in 
the cabin, and nominally lived there; 
still, being anything but sedentary in 
their habits, they were scarcely ever 
in it except at mealtimes, and just 
before sleeping-time, when they passed 
through it to their own peculiar 
quarters.

In this one matter, Ahab seemed no 
exception to most American whale 
captains, who, as a set, rather incline 
to the opinion that by rights the 
ship’s cabin belongs to them; and that 
it is by courtesy alone that anybody 
else is, at any time, permitted there. 
So that, in real truth, the mates and 
harpooneers of the Pequod might more 
properly be said to have lived out of 
the cabin than in it. For when they did 
enter it, it was something as a 
street-door enters a house; turning 
inwards for a moment, only to be turned 
out the next; and, as a permanent 
thing, residing in the open air. Nor 
did they lose much hereby; in the cabin 
was no companionship; socially, Ahab 
was inaccessible. Though nominally 
included in the census of Christendom, 
he was still an alien to it. He lived 
in the world, as the last of the Grisly 
Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as 
when Spring and Summer had departed, 
that wild Logan of the woods, burying 
himself in the hollow of a tree, lived 
out the winter there, sucking his own 
paws; so, in his inclement, howling old 
age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved 
trunk of his body, there fed upon the 
sullen paws of its gloom! 

 

CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.

It was during the more pleasant 
weather, that 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.

Now, as the business of standing 
mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very 
ancient and interesting one, let us in 
some measure expatiate here. I take it, 
that the earliest standers of 
mast-heads were the old Egyptians; 
because, in all my researches, I find 
none prior to them. For though their 
progenitors, the builders of Babel, 
must doubtless, by their tower, have 
intended to rear the loftiest mast-head 
in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere 
the final truck was put to it) as that 
great stone mast of theirs may be said 
to have gone by the board, in the dread 
gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we 
cannot give these Babel builders 
priority over the Egyptians. And that 
the Egyptians were a nation of 
mast-head standers, is an assertion 
based upon the general belief among 
archaeologists, that the first pyramids 
were founded for astronomical purposes: 
a theory singularly supported by the 
peculiar stair-like formation of all 
four sides of those edifices; whereby, 
with prodigious long upliftings of 
their legs, those old astronomers were 
wont to mount to the apex, and sing out 
for new stars; even as the look-outs of 
a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a 
whale just bearing in sight. In Saint 
Stylites, the famous Christian hermit 
of old times, who built him a lofty 
stone pillar in the desert and spent 
the whole latter portion of his life on 
its summit, hoisting his food from the 
ground with a tackle; in him we have a 
remarkable instance of a dauntless 
stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to 
be driven from his place by fogs or 
frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but 
valiantly facing everything out to the 
last, literally died at his post. Of 
modern standers-of-mast-heads we have 
but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, 
and bronze men; who, though well 
capable of facing out a stiff gale, are 
still entirely incompetent to the 
business of singing out upon 
discovering any strange sight. There is 
Napoleon; who, upon the top of the 
column of Vendome, stands with arms 
folded, some one hundred and fifty feet 
in the air; careless, now, who rules 
the decks below; whether Louis 
Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the 
Devil. Great Washington, too, stands 
high aloft on his towering main-mast in 
Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ 
pillars, his column marks that point of 
human grandeur beyond which few mortals 
will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a 
capstan of gun-metal, stands his 
mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever 
when most obscured by that London 
smoke, token is yet given that a hidden 
hero is there; for where there is 
smoke, must be fire. But neither great 
Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, 
will answer a single hail from below, 
however madly invoked to befriend by 
their counsels the distracted decks 
upon which they gaze; however it may be 
surmised, that their spirits penetrate 
through the thick haze of the future, 
and descry what shoals and what rocks 
must be shunned.

It may seem unwarrantable to couple in 
any respect the mast-head standers of 
the land with those of the sea; but 
that in truth it is not so, is plainly 
evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, 
the sole historian of Nantucket, stands 
accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, 
that in the early times of the whale 
fishery, ere ships were regularly 
launched in pursuit of the game, the 
people of that island erected lofty 
spars along the sea-coast, to which the 
look-outs ascended by means of nailed 
cleats, something as fowls go upstairs 
in a hen-house. A few years ago this 
same plan was adopted by the Bay 
whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon 
descrying the game, gave notice to the 
ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But 
this custom has now become obsolete; 
turn we then to the one proper 
mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. 
The three mast-heads are kept manned 
from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen 
taking their regular turns (as at the 
helm), and relieving each other every 
two hours. In the serene weather of the 
tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the 
mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative 
man it is delightful. 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 the most part, in this tropic 
whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness 
invests you; you hear no news; read no 
gazettes; extras with startling 
accounts of commonplaces never delude 
you into unnecessary excitements; you 
hear of no domestic afflictions; 
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.

In one of those southern whalesmen, 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. To be sure, 
in cold weather you may carry your 
house aloft with you, in the shape of a 
watch-coat; but properly speaking the 
thickest watch-coat is no more of a 
house than the unclad body; for as the 
soul is glued inside of its fleshy 
tabernacle, and cannot freely move 
about in it, nor even move out of it, 
without running great risk of perishing 
(like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the 
snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat 
is not so much of a house as it is a 
mere envelope, or additional skin 
encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or 
chest of drawers in your body, and no 
more can you make a convenient closet 
of your watch-coat.

Concerning all this, it is much to be 
deplored that the mast-heads of a 
southern whale ship are unprovided with 
those enviable little tents or pulpits, 
called crow’s-nests, in which the 
look-outs of a Greenland whaler are 
protected from the inclement weather of 
the frozen seas. In the fireside 
narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A 
Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of 
the Greenland Whale, and incidentally 
for the re-discovery of the Lost 
Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” 
in this admirable volume, all standers 
of mast-heads are furnished with a 
charmingly circumstantial account of 
the then recently invented crow’s-nest 
of the Glacier, which was the name of 
Captain Sleet’s good craft. He called 
it the Sleet’s crow’s-nest, in honour 
of himself; he being the original 
inventor and patentee, and free from 
all ridiculous false delicacy, and 
holding that if we call our own 
children after our own names (we 
fathers being the original inventors 
and patentees), so likewise should we 
denominate after ourselves any other 
apparatus we may beget. In shape, the 
Sleet’s crow’s-nest is something like a 
large tierce or pipe; it is open above, 
however, where it is furnished with a 
movable side-screen to keep to windward 
of your head in a hard gale. Being 
fixed on the summit of the mast, you 
ascend into it through a little 
trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after 
side, or side next the stern of the 
ship, is a comfortable seat, with a 
locker underneath for umbrellas, 
comforters, and coats. In front is a 
leather rack, in which to keep your 
speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and 
other nautical conveniences. When 
Captain Sleet in person stood his 
mast-head in this crow’s-nest of his, 
he tells us that he always had a rifle 
with him (also fixed in the rack), 
together with a powder flask and shot, 
for the purpose of popping off the 
stray narwhales, or vagrant sea 
unicorns infesting those waters; for 
you cannot successfully shoot at them 
from the deck owing to the resistance 
of the water, but to shoot down upon 
them is a very different thing. Now, it 
was plainly a labor of love for Captain 
Sleet to describe, as he does, all the 
little detailed conveniences of his 
crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges 
upon many of these, and though he 
treats us to a very scientific account 
of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, 
with a small compass he kept there for 
the purpose of counteracting the errors 
resulting from what is called the 
“local attraction” of all binnacle 
magnets; an error ascribable to the 
horizontal vicinity of the iron in the 
ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s 
case, perhaps, to there having been so 
many broken-down blacksmiths among her 
crew; I say, that though the Captain is 
very discreet and scientific here, yet, 
for all his learned “binnacle 
deviations,” “azimuth compass 
observations,” and “approximate 
errors,” he knows very well, Captain 
Sleet, that he was not so much immersed 
in those profound magnetic meditations, 
as to fail being attracted occasionally 
towards that well replenished little 
case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one 
side of his crow’s nest, within easy 
reach of his hand. Though, upon the 
whole, I greatly admire and even love 
the brave, the honest, and learned 
Captain; yet I take it very ill of him 
that he should so utterly ignore that 
case-bottle, seeing what a faithful 
friend and comforter it must have been, 
while with mittened fingers and hooded 
head he was studying the mathematics 
aloft there in that bird’s nest within 
three or four perches of the pole.

But if we Southern whale-fishers are 
not so snugly housed aloft as Captain 
Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet 
that disadvantage is greatly 
counter-balanced by the widely 
contrasting serenity of those seductive 
seas in which we South fishers mostly 
float. For one, I used to lounge up the 
rigging very leisurely, resting in the 
top to have a chat with Queequeg, or 
any one else off duty whom I might find 
there; then ascending a little way 
further, and throwing a lazy leg over 
the top-sail yard, take a preliminary 
view of the watery pastures, and so at 
last mount to my ultimate destination.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, 
and frankly admit that I kept but sorry 
guard. With the problem 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. Beware of such 
an 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 seeking 
sentiment 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.”

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 an opium-like 
listlessness of vacant, unconscious 
reverie is this absent-minded youth by 
the blending cadence of waves with 
thoughts, that at last he loses his 
identity; takes the mystic ocean at his 
feet for the visible image of that 
deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading 
mankind and nature; and every strange, 
half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing 
that eludes him; every 
dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some 
undiscernible form, seems to him the 
embodiment of those elusive thoughts 
that only people the soul by 
continually flitting through it. In 
this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs 
away to whence it came; becomes 
diffused through time and space; like 
Crammer’s (Thomas Cranmer) sprinkled 
Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a 
part of every shore the round globe 
over.

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. But while this sleep, 
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. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! 

 

CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.

(Enter Ahab: Then, all)

It was not a great while after the 
affair of the pipe, that 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 steady, 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.

But 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; 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;—Ahab now shut up 
within his cabin; anon, pacing the 
deck, with the same intense bigotry of 
purpose in his aspect.

It drew near the close of day. Suddenly 
he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and 
inserting his bone leg into the 
auger-hole there, 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. 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, 
he 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.

But, they were all eagerness again, as 
Ahab, now half-revolving in his 
pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high 
up a shroud, and tightly, almost 
convulsively grasping it, addressed 
them thus:—

“All ye mast-headers have before now 
heard me give orders about a white 
whale. 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? 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 himself, 
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 Dick!”

“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, 
with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been 
eyeing his superior with increasing 
surprise, but at last seemed struck 
with a thought which somewhat explained 
all the wonder. “Captain Ahab, I have 
heard of Moby Dick—but it was 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 
on 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 
razed me; made a poor pegging lubber of 
me for ever and a day!” Then tossing 
both arms, with measureless 
imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! 
and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and 
round the Horn, and round the Norway 
Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames 
before I give him up. And this is what 
ye have shipped for, men! to chase that 
white whale on both sides of land, and 
over all sides of earth, till he spouts 
black blood and rolls fin out. 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, man, and the accountants 
have computed their great 
counting-house the globe, by girdling 
it with guineas, one to every three 
parts of an inch; then, let me tell 
thee, that my vengeance will fetch a 
great premium here!”

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

“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; 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 has 
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 Chilian! 
he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid 
the general hurricane, thy one tost 
sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is 
it? Reckon it. ‘Tis but to help strike 
a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. 
What is it more? 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.

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. “The crew alone now drink. 
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; forks 
out at the serpent-snapping eye. 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!

“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. Why, now, 
this pewter had run brimming again, 
were’t not thou St. Vitus’ imp—away, 
thou ague!

“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, 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—yon three most honourable 
gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant 
harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, 
when the great Pope washes the feet of 
beggars, using his tiara for ewer? 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 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 37. Sunset.

The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab 
sitting alone, and gazing out.

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.

Yonder, 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. Yet is it bright with many a 
gem; I the wearer, see not its far 
flashings; but darkly feel that I wear 
that, that dazzlingly confounds. ‘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!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, 
when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, 
so the sunset soothed. No more. This 
lovely light, 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—good night! 
(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 I’m 
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! 

 

CHAPTER 38. Dusk.

By the mainmast; Starbuck leaning 
against it.

My soul is more than matched; she’s 
overmanned; and by a madman! 
Insufferable sting, that sanity should 
ground arms on such a field! But he 
drilled deep down, and blasted all my 
reason out of me! I think I see his 
impious end; but feel that I must help 
him to it. 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! Who’s over him, 
he cries;—aye, he would be a democrat 
to all above; look, how he lords it 
over all below! Oh! I plainly see my 
miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; 
and worse yet, to hate with touch of 
pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid 
woe would shrivel me up, had I it. 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 to lift 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 dead water of the 
wake, and further on, hunted by its 
wolfish gurglings. The long howl 
thrills me through! Peace! ye 
revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! 
‘tis in an hour like this, with soul 
beat down and held to knowledge,—as 
wild, untutored things are forced to 
feed—Oh, life! ‘tis now that I do feel 
the latent horror in thee! but ‘tis not 
me! that horror’s out of me! and with 
the soft feeling of the human in me, 
yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, 
phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, 
bind me, O ye blessed influences! 

 

CHAPTER 39. First Night Watch. Fore-Top.

(Stubb solus, and 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. 
Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, 
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—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 its 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.—Aye, aye, sir, just through 
with this job—coming. 

 

CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle. 
HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.

(Foresail rises and discovers the watch 
standing, lounging, leaning, and lying 
in various attitudes, all singing in 
chorus.)

 Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish 
ladies! Farewell and adieu to you, 
ladies of Spain! Our captain’s 
commanded.—

1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don’t 
be sentimental; it’s bad for the 
digestion! Take a tonic, follow me! 
(Sings, and all follow)

 Our captain stood upon the deck, A 
spy-glass in his hand, A viewing of 
those gallant whales That blew at every 
strand. Oh, your tubs in your boats, my 
boys, And by your braces stand, And 
we’ll have one of those fine whales, 
Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, 
my lads! may your hearts never fail! 
While the bold harpooner is striking 
the whale!

MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. 
Eight bells there, forward!

2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! 
Eight bells there! d’ye hear, bell-boy? 
Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou 
blackling! and let me call the watch. 
I’ve the sort of mouth for that—the 
hogshead mouth. So, so, (thrusts his 
head down the scuttle,) 
Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells 
there below! Tumble up!

DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, 
maty; fat night for that. I mark this 
in our old Mogul’s wine; it’s quite as 
deadening to some as filliping to 
others. We sing; they sleep—aye, lie 
down there, like ground-tier butts. At 
‘em again! There, take this 
copper-pump, and hail ‘em through it. 
Tell ‘em to avast dreaming of their 
lasses. Tell ‘em it’s the resurrection; 
they must kiss their last, and come to 
judgment. That’s the way—that’s it; thy 
throat ain’t spoiled with eating 
Amsterdam butter.

FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let’s have a 
jig or two before we ride to anchor in 
Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes 
the other watch. Stand by all legs! 
Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your 
tambourine!

PIP. (Sulky and sleepy) Don’t know 
where it is.

FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, 
and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; 
merry’s the word; hurrah! Damn me, 
won’t you dance? Form, now, 
Indian-file, and gallop into the 
double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs! 
legs!

ICELAND SAILOR. I don’t like your 
floor, maty; it’s too springy to my 
taste. I’m used to ice-floors. I’m 
sorry to throw cold water on the 
subject; but excuse me.

MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where’s your 
girls? Who but a fool would take his 
left hand by his right, and say to 
himself, how d’ye do? Partners! I must 
have partners!

SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a 
green!—then I’ll hop with ye; yea, turn 
grasshopper!

LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye 
sulkies, there’s plenty more of us. Hoe 
corn when you may, say I. All legs go 
to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the 
music; now for it!

AZORE SAILOR. (Ascending, and pitching 
the tambourine up the scuttle.) Here 
you are, Pip; and there’s the 
windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, 
boys! (The half of them dance to the 
tambourine; some go below; some sleep 
or lie among the coils of rigging. 
Oaths a-plenty.)

AZORE SAILOR. (Dancing) Go it, Pip! 
Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig 
it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; 
break the jinglers!

PIP. Jinglers, you say?—there goes 
another, dropped off; I pound it so.

CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, 
and pound away; make a pagoda of 
thyself.

FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy 
hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! 
Split jibs! tear yourselves!

TASHTEGO. (Quietly smoking) That’s a 
white man; he calls that fun: humph! I 
save my sweat.

OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those 
jolly lads bethink them of what they 
are dancing over. I’ll dance over your 
grave, I will—that’s the bitterest 
threat of your night-women, that beat 
head-winds round corners. O Christ! to 
think of the green navies and the 
green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike 
the whole world’s a ball, as you 
scholars have it; and so ‘tis right to 
make one ballroom of it. Dance on, 
lads, you’re young; I was once.

3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! 
this is worse than pulling after whales 
in a calm—give us a whiff, Tash.

(They cease dancing, and gather in 
clusters. Meantime the sky darkens—the 
wind rises.)

LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it’ll 
be douse sail soon. The sky-born, 
high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou 
showest thy black brow, Seeva!

MALTESE SAILOR. (Reclining and shaking 
his cap.) It’s the waves—the snow’s 
caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake 
their tassels soon. Now would all the 
waves were women, then I’d go drown, 
and chassee with them evermore! There’s 
naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not 
match it!—as those swift glances of 
warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when 
the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, 
bursting grapes.

SICILIAN SAILOR. (Reclining.) Tell me 
not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet 
interlacings of the limbs—lithe 
swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip! 
heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch 
and go! not taste, observe ye, else 
come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (Nudging.)

TAHITAN SAILOR. (Reclining on a mat.) 
Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing 
girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, 
high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on 
thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I 
saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! 
green the first day I brought ye 
thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah 
me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! 
How then, if so be transplanted to yon 
sky? Hear I the roaring streams from 
Pirohitee’s peak of spears, when they 
leap down the crags and drown the 
villages?—The blast! the blast! Up, 
spine, and meet it! (Leaps to his feet.)

PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls 
swashing ‘gainst the side! Stand by for 
reefing, hearties! the winds are just 
crossing swords, pell-mell they’ll go 
lunging presently.

DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! 
so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! 
Well done! The mate there holds ye to 
it stiffly. He’s no more afraid than 
the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to 
fight the Baltic with storm-lashed 
guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!

4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his 
orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab 
tell him he must always kill a squall, 
something as they burst a waterspout 
with a pistol—fire your ship right into 
it!

ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old 
man’s a grand old cove! We are the lads 
to hunt him up his whale!

ALL. Aye! aye!

OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines 
shake! Pines are the hardest sort of 
tree to live when shifted to any other 
soil, and here there’s none but the 
crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! 
steady. This is the sort of weather 
when brave hearts snap ashore, and 
keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain 
has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, 
there’s another in the sky—lurid-like, 
ye see, all else pitch black.

DAGGOO. What of that? Who’s afraid of 
black’s afraid of me! I’m quarried out 
of it!

SPANISH SAILOR. (Aside.) He wants to 
bully, ah!—the old grudge makes me 
touchy (Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, 
thy race is the undeniable dark side of 
mankind—devilish dark at that. No 
offence.

DAGGOO (grimly). None.

ST. JAGO’S SAILOR. That Spaniard’s mad 
or drunk. But that can’t be, or else in 
his one case our old Mogul’s 
fire-waters are somewhat long in 
working.

5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What’s that I 
saw—lightning? Yes.

SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his 
teeth.

DAGGOO (springing). Swallow thine, 
mannikin! White skin, white liver!

SPANISH SAILOR (meeting him). Knife 
thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!

ALL. A row! a row! a row!

TASHTEGO (with a whiff). A row a’low, 
and a row aloft—Gods and men—both 
brawlers! Humph!

BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The 
Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in 
with ye!

ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the 
Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a ring!

OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! 
the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain 
struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! 
No? Why then, God, mad’st thou the ring?

MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. 
Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant 
sails! Stand by to reef topsails!

ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my 
jollies! (They scatter.)

PIP (shrinking under the windlass). 
Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, 
crash! there goes the jib-stay! 
Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here 
comes the royal yard! It’s worse than 
being in the whirled woods, the last 
day of the year! Who’d go climbing 
after chestnuts now? But there they go, 
all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine 
prospects to ‘em; they’re on the road 
to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what 
a squall! But those chaps there are 
worse yet—they are your white squalls, 
they. White squalls? white whale, 
shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all 
their chat just now, and the white 
whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once! 
and only this evening—it makes me 
jingle all over like my tambourine—that 
anaconda of an old man swore ‘em in to 
hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft 
there somewhere in yon darkness, have 
mercy on this small black boy down 
here; preserve him from all men that 
have no bowels to feel fear! 

 

CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.

I, 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.

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. 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 and 
malignity, which whale, after doing 
great mischief to his assailants, had 
completely escaped them; to some minds 
it was not an unfair presumption, I 
say, that the whale in question must 
have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet 
as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had 
been marked by various and not 
unfrequent instances of great ferocity, 
cunning, and malice in the monster 
attacked; therefore it was, that those 
who by accident ignorantly gave battle 
to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, 
for the most part, were content to 
ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, 
more, as it were, to the perils of the 
Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to 
the individual cause. In that way, 
mostly, the disastrous encounter 
between Ahab and the whale had hitherto 
been popularly regarded.

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, or 
devouring amputations—but fatal to the 
last degree of fatality; those repeated 
disastrous repulses, all accumulating 
and piling their terrors upon Moby 
Dick; those things had gone far to 
shake the fortitude of many brave 
hunters, to whom the story of the White 
Whale had eventually come.

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 too such a calling as he does, 
the whaleman is wrapped by influences 
all tending to make his fancy pregnant 
with many a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, that ever gathering 
volume from the mere transit over the 
widest watery spaces, the outblown 
rumors of the White Whale did in the 
end incorporate with themselves all 
manner of morbid hints, and half-formed 
foetal suggestions of supernatural 
agencies, which eventually invested 
Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed 
from anything that visibly appears. So 
that in many cases such a panic did he 
finally strike, that few who by those 
rumors, at least, had heard of the 
White Whale, few of those hunters were 
willing to encounter the perils of his 
jaw.

But there were still other and more 
vital practical influences at work. Not 
even at the present day has the 
original prestige of the Sperm Whale, 
as fearfully distinguished from all 
other species of the leviathan, died 
out of the minds of the whalemen as a 
body. There are those this day among 
them, who, though intelligent and 
courageous enough in offering battle to 
the Greenland or Right whale, would 
perhaps—either from professional 
inexperience, or incompetency, or 
timidity, decline a contest with the 
Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are 
plenty of whalemen, especially among 
those whaling nations not sailing under 
the American flag, who have never 
hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, 
but whose sole knowledge of the 
leviathan is restricted to the ignoble 
monster primitively pursued in the 
North; seated on their hatches, these 
men will hearken with a childish 
fireside interest and awe, to the wild, 
strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor 
is the pre-eminent tremendousness of 
the great Sperm Whale anywhere more 
feelingly comprehended, than on board 
of those prows which stem him.

And as if the now tested reality of his 
might had in former legendary times 
thrown its shadow before it; we find 
some book naturalists—Olassen and 
Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not 
only to be a consternation to every 
other creature in the sea, but also to 
be so incredibly ferocious as 
continually to be athirst for human 
blood. Nor even down to so late a time 
as Cuvier’s, were these or almost 
similar impressions effaced. For in his 
Natural History, the Baron himself 
affirms that at sight of the Sperm 
Whale, all fish (sharks included) are 
“struck with the most lively terrors,” 
and “often in the precipitancy of their 
flight dash themselves against the 
rocks with such violence as to cause 
instantaneous death.” And however the 
general experiences in the fishery may 
amend such reports as these; yet in 
their full terribleness, even to the 
bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the 
superstitious belief in them is, in 
some vicissitudes of their vocation, 
revived in the minds of the hunters.

So that overawed by the rumors and 
portents concerning him, not a few of 
the fishermen recalled, in reference to 
Moby Dick, the earlier days of the 
Sperm Whale fishery, when it was 
oftentimes hard to induce long 
practised Right whalemen to embark in 
the perils of this new and daring 
warfare; such men protesting that 
although other leviathans might be 
hopefully pursued, yet to chase and 
point lance at such an apparition as 
the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. 
That to attempt it, would be inevitably 
to be torn into a quick eternity. On 
this head, there are some remarkable 
documents that may be consulted.

Nevertheless, some there were, who even 
in the face of these things were ready 
to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still 
greater number who, chancing only to 
hear of him distantly and vaguely, 
without the specific details of any 
certain calamity, and without 
superstitious accompaniments, were 
sufficiently hardy not to flee from the 
battle if offered.

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 Nor’ West 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); 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.

But even 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. 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 creamy foam, all 
spangled with golden 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 several fatalities had attended 
his chase. 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 or death that 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 
comrades, they swam out of the white 
curds of the whale’s direful wrath into 
the serene, exasperating sunlight, that 
smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

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. Small reason was there 
to doubt, then, that ever since that 
almost 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 and spiritual 
exasperations. The White Whale swam 
before him as the monomaniac 
incarnation of all those malicious 
agencies which some deep men feel 
eating in them, till they are left 
living on with half a heart and half a 
lung. That intangible malignity which 
has been from the beginning; to whose 
dominion even the modern Christians 
ascribe one-half of the worlds; which 
the ancient Ophites of the east 
reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab 
did not fall down and worship it like 
them; but deliriously transferring its 
idea to the abhorred white whale, he 
pitted himself, all mutilated, against 
it. 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.

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, but nothing more. Yet, when 
by this collision forced to turn 
towards home, and for long months of 
days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay 
stretched together in one hammock, 
rounding in mid winter that dreary, 
howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, 
that his torn body and gashed soul bled 
into one another; and so interfusing, 
made him mad. That it was only then, on 
the homeward voyage, after the 
encounter, that the final monomania 
seized him, seems all but certain from 
the fact that, at intervals during the 
passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, 
though unlimbed of a leg, yet such 
vital strength yet lurked in his 
Egyptian chest, and was moreover 
intensified by his delirium, that his 
mates were forced to lace him fast, 
even there, as he sailed, raving in his 
hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung 
to the mad rockings of the gales. And, 
when running into more sufferable 
latitudes, the ship, with mild 
stun’sails spread, floated across the 
tranquil tropics, and, to all 
appearances, the old man’s delirium 
seemed left behind him with the Cape 
Horn swells, and he came forth from his 
dark den into the blessed light and 
air; even then, when he bore that firm, 
collected front, however pale, and 
issued his calm orders once again; and 
his mates thanked God the direful 
madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, 
in his hidden self, raved on. Human 
madness is oftentimes a cunning and 
most feline thing. 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; like the 
unabated Hudson, when that noble 
Northman flows narrowly, but 
unfathomably through the Highland 
gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing 
monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad 
madness had been left behind; so in 
that broad madness, not one jot of his 
great natural intellect had perished. 
That before living agent, now became 
the living 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, 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 halls 
of Thermes; where far beneath the 
fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, 
his root of grandeur, his whole awful 
essence sits in bearded state; an 
antique buried beneath antiquities, and 
throned on torsoes! So with a broken 
throne, the great gods mock that 
captive king; so like a Caryatid, he 
patient sits, upholding on his frozen 
brow the piled entablatures of ages. 
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. And so too, all the 
added moodiness which always 
afterwards, to the very day of sailing 
in the Pequod on the present voyage, 
sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so 
very unlikely, that 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 idea; such an 
one, could he be found, would seem the 
very man to dart his iron and lift his 
lance against the most appalling of all 
brutes. 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! They 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.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, 
ungodly old man, chasing with curses a 
Job’s whale round the world, at the 
head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of 
mongrel renegades, and castaways, and 
cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by 
the incompetence of mere unaided virtue 
or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the 
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; the White Whale 
as much their insufferable foe as his; 
how all this came to be—what the White 
Whale was to them, or how to their 
unconscious understandings, also, in 
some dim, unsuspected way, he might 
have seemed the gliding great demon of 
the seas of life,—all this to explain, 
would be to dive deeper than Ishmael 
can go. 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 
seventy-four 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. 

 

CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.

What the white whale was to Ahab, has 
been hinted; what, at times, he was to 
me, as yet remains unsaid.

Aside from those more obvious 
considerations touching Moby Dick, 
which could not but occasionally awaken 
in any man’s soul some alarm, there was 
another thought, or rather vague, 
nameless horror concerning him, which 
at times by its intensity completely 
overpowered all the rest; and yet so 
mystical and well nigh ineffable was 
it, that I almost despair of putting it 
in a comprehensible form. It was the 
whiteness of the whale that above all 
things appalled me. But how can I hope 
to explain myself here; and yet, in 
some dim, random way, explain myself I 
must, else all these chapters might be 
naught.

Though in many natural objects, 
whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, 
as if imparting some special virtue of 
its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and 
pearls; and though various nations have 
in some way recognised a certain royal 
preeminence in this hue; even the 
barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu 
placing the title “Lord of the White 
Elephants” above all their other 
magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; 
and the modern kings of Siam unfurling 
the same snow-white quadruped in the 
royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag 
bearing the one figure of a snow-white 
charger; and the great Austrian Empire, 
Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, 
having for the imperial colour the same 
imperial hue; and though this 
pre-eminence in it applies to the human 
race itself, giving the white man ideal 
mastership over every dusky tribe; and 
though, besides, all this, whiteness 
has been even made significant of 
gladness, for among the Romans a white 
stone marked a joyful day; and though 
in other mortal sympathies and 
symbolizings, this same hue is made the 
emblem of many touching, noble 
things—the innocence of brides, the 
benignity of age; though among the Red 
Men of America the giving of the white 
belt of wampum was the deepest pledge 
of honour; though in many climes, 
whiteness typifies the majesty of 
Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and 
contributes to the daily state of kings 
and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; 
though even in the higher mysteries of 
the most august religions it has been 
made the symbol of the divine 
spotlessness and power; by the Persian 
fire worshippers, the white forked 
flame being held the holiest on the 
altar; and in the Greek mythologies, 
Great Jove himself being made incarnate 
in a snow-white bull; and though to the 
noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice 
of the sacred White Dog was by far the 
holiest festival of their theology, 
that spotless, faithful creature being 
held the purest envoy they could send 
to the Great Spirit with the annual 
tidings of their own fidelity; and 
though directly from the Latin word for 
white, all Christian priests derive the 
name of one part of their sacred 
vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath 
the cassock; and though among the holy 
pomps of the Romish faith, white is 
specially employed in the celebration 
of the Passion of our Lord; though in 
the Vision of St. John, white robes are 
given to the redeemed, and the 
four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in 
white before the great-white throne, 
and the Holy One that sitteth there 
white like wool; yet for all these 
accumulated associations, with whatever 
is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, 
there yet lurks an elusive something in 
the innermost idea of this hue, which 
strikes more of panic to the soul than 
that redness which affrights in blood.

This elusive quality it is, which 
causes the thought of whiteness, when 
divorced from more kindly associations, 
and coupled with any object terrible in 
itself, to heighten that terror to the 
furthest bounds. Witness the white bear 
of the poles, and the white shark of 
the tropics; what but their smooth, 
flaky whiteness makes them the 
transcendent horrors they are? That 
ghastly whiteness it is which imparts 
such an abhorrent mildness, even more 
loathsome than terrific, to the dumb 
gloating of their aspect. So that not 
the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic 
coat can so stagger courage as the 
white-shrouded bear or shark.*

*With reference to the Polar bear, it 
may possibly be urged by him who would 
fain go still deeper into this matter, 
that it is not the whiteness, 
separately regarded, which heightens 
the intolerable hideousness of that 
brute; for, analysed, that heightened 
hideousness, it might be said, only 
rises from the circumstance, that the 
irresponsible ferociousness of the 
creature stands invested in the fleece 
of celestial innocence and love; and 
hence, by bringing together two such 
opposite emotions in our minds, the 
Polar bear frightens us with so 
unnatural a contrast. But even assuming 
all this to be true; yet, were it not 
for the whiteness, you would not have 
that intensified terror.

As for the white shark, the white 
gliding ghostliness of repose in that 
creature, when beheld in his ordinary 
moods, strangely tallies with the same 
quality in the Polar quadruped. This 
peculiarity is most vividly hit by the 
French in the name they bestow upon 
that fish. The Romish mass for the dead 
begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal 
rest), whence Requiem denominating the 
mass itself, and any other funeral 
music. Now, in allusion to the white, 
silent stillness of death in this 
shark, and the mild deadliness of his 
habits, the French call him Requin.

Bethink thee of the albatross, whence 
come those clouds of spiritual 
wonderment and pale dread, in which 
that white phantom sails in all 
imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw 
that spell; but God’s great, 
unflattering laureate, Nature.*

*I remember the first albatross I ever 
saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in 
waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. 
From my forenoon watch below, I 
ascended to the overclouded deck; and 
there, dashed upon the main hatches, I 
saw a regal, feathery thing of 
unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, 
Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it 
arched forth its vast archangel wings, 
as if to embrace some holy ark. 
Wondrous flutterings and throbbings 
shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it 
uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in 
supernatural distress. Through its 
inexpressible, strange eyes, methought 
I peeped to secrets which took hold of 
God. As Abraham before the angels, I 
bowed myself; the white thing was so 
white, its wings so wide, and in those 
for ever exiled waters, I had lost the 
miserable warping memories of 
traditions and of towns. Long I gazed 
at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot 
tell, can only hint, the things that 
darted through me then. But at last I 
awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what 
bird was this. A goney, he replied. 
Goney! never had heard that name 
before; is it conceivable that this 
glorious thing is utterly unknown to 
men ashore! never! But some time after, 
I learned that goney was some seaman’s 
name for albatross. So that by no 
possibility could Coleridge’s wild 
Rhyme have had aught to do with those 
mystical impressions which were mine, 
when I saw that bird upon our deck. For 
neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor 
knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, 
in saying this, I do but indirectly 
burnish a little brighter the noble 
merit of the poem and the poet.

I assert, then, that in the wondrous 
bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly 
lurks the secret of the spell; a truth 
the more evinced in this, that by a 
solecism of terms there are birds 
called grey albatrosses; and these I 
have frequently seen, but never with 
such emotions as when I beheld the 
Antarctic fowl.

But how had the mystic thing been 
caught? Whisper it not, and I will 
tell; with a treacherous hook and line, 
as the fowl floated on the sea. At last 
the Captain made a postman of it; tying 
a lettered, leathern tally round its 
neck, with the ship’s time and place; 
and then letting it escape. But I doubt 
not, that leathern tally, meant for 
man, was taken off in Heaven, when the 
white fowl flew to join the 
wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring 
cherubim!

Most famous in our Western annals and 
Indian traditions is that of the White 
Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent 
milk-white charger, large-eyed, 
small-headed, bluff-chested, and with 
the dignity of a thousand monarchs in 
his lofty, overscorning carriage. He 
was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of 
wild horses, whose pastures in those 
days were only fenced by the Rocky 
Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their 
flaming head he westward trooped it 
like that chosen star which every 
evening leads on the hosts of light. 
The flashing cascade of his mane, the 
curving comet of his tail, invested him 
with housings more resplendent than 
gold and silver-beaters could have 
furnished him. A most imperial and 
archangelical apparition of that 
unfallen, western world, which to the 
eyes of the old trappers and hunters 
revived the glories of those primeval 
times when Adam walked majestic as a 
god, bluff-browed and fearless as this 
mighty steed. Whether marching amid his 
aides and marshals in the van of 
countless cohorts that endlessly 
streamed it over the plains, like an 
Ohio; or whether with his circumambient 
subjects browsing all around at the 
horizon, the White Steed gallopingly 
reviewed them with warm nostrils 
reddening through his cool milkiness; 
in whatever aspect he presented 
himself, always to the bravest Indians 
he was the object of trembling 
reverence and awe. Nor can it be 
questioned from what stands on 
legendary record of this noble horse, 
that it was his spiritual whiteness 
chiefly, which so clothed him with 
divineness; and that this divineness 
had that in it which, though commanding 
worship, at the same time enforced a 
certain nameless terror.

But there are other instances where 
this whiteness loses all that accessory 
and strange glory which invests it in 
the White Steed and Albatross.

What is it that in the Albino man so 
peculiarly repels and often shocks the 
eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by 
his own kith and kin! It is that 
whiteness which invests him, a thing 
expressed by the name he bears. The 
Albino is as well made as other men—has 
no substantive deformity—and yet this 
mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness 
makes him more strangely hideous than 
the ugliest abortion. Why should this 
be so?

Nor, in quite other aspects, does 
Nature in her least palpable but not 
the less malicious agencies, fail to 
enlist among her forces this crowning 
attribute of the terrible. From its 
snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of 
the Southern Seas has been denominated 
the White Squall. Nor, in some historic 
instances, has the art of human malice 
omitted so potent an auxiliary. How 
wildly it heightens the effect of that 
passage in Froissart, when, masked in 
the snowy symbol of their faction, the 
desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder 
their bailiff in the market-place!

Nor, in some things, does the common, 
hereditary experience of all mankind 
fail to bear witness to the 
supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot 
well be doubted, that the one visible 
quality in the aspect of the dead which 
most appals 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.

Therefore, in his other moods, 
symbolize whatever grand or gracious 
thing he will by whiteness, no man can 
deny that in its profoundest idealized 
significance it calls up a peculiar 
apparition to the soul.

But though without dissent this point 
be fixed, how is mortal man to account 
for it? To analyse it, would seem 
impossible. Can we, then, by the 
citation of some of those instances 
wherein this thing of whiteness—though 
for the time either wholly or in great 
part stripped of all direct 
associations calculated to impart to it 
aught fearful, but nevertheless, is 
found to exert over us the same 
sorcery, however modified;—can we thus 
hope to light upon some chance clue to 
conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?

Let us try. But in a matter like this, 
subtlety appeals to subtlety, and 
without imagination no man can follow 
another into these halls. And though, 
doubtless, some at least of the 
imaginative impressions about to be 
presented may have been shared by most 
men, yet few perhaps were entirely 
conscious of them at the time, and 
therefore may not be able to recall 
them now.

Why to the man of untutored ideality, 
who happens to be but loosely 
acquainted with the peculiar character 
of the day, does the bare mention of 
Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such 
long, dreary, speechless processions of 
slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and 
hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the 
unread, unsophisticated Protestant of 
the Middle American States, why does 
the passing mention of a White Friar or 
a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless 
statue in the soul?

Or what is there apart from the 
traditions of dungeoned warriors and 
kings (which will not wholly account 
for it) that makes the White Tower of 
London tell so much more strongly on 
the imagination of an untravelled 
American, than those other storied 
structures, its neighbors—the Byward 
Tower, or even the Bloody? And those 
sublimer towers, the White Mountains of 
New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar 
moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness 
over the soul at the bare mention of 
that name, while the thought of 
Virginia’s Blue Ridge is full of a 
soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, 
irrespective of all latitudes and 
longitudes, does the name of the White 
Sea exert such a spectralness over the 
fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea 
lulls us with mortal thoughts of long 
lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, 
followed by the gaudiest and yet 
sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a 
wholly unsubstantial instance, purely 
addressed to the fancy, why, in reading 
the old fairy tales of Central Europe, 
does “the tall pale man” of the Hartz 
forests, whose changeless pallor 
unrustlingly glides through the green 
of the groves—why is this phantom more 
terrible than all the whooping imps of 
the Blocksburg?

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance 
of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; 
nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; 
nor the tearlessness of arid skies that 
never rain; nor the sight of her wide 
field of leaning spires, wrenched 
cope-stones, and crosses all adroop 
(like canted yards of anchored fleets); 
and her suburban avenues of house-walls 
lying over upon each other, as a tossed 
pack of cards;—it is not these things 
alone which make tearless Lima, the 
strangest, saddest city thou can’st 
see. For Lima has taken the white veil; 
and there is a higher horror in this 
whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, 
this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever 
new; admits not the cheerful greenness 
of complete decay; spreads over her 
broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an 
apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.

I know that, to the common 
apprehension, this phenomenon of 
whiteness is not confessed to be the 
prime agent in exaggerating the terror 
of objects otherwise terrible; nor to 
the unimaginative mind is there aught 
of terror in those appearances whose 
awfulness to another mind almost solely 
consists in this one phenomenon, 
especially when exhibited under any 
form at all approaching to muteness or 
universality. What I mean by these two 
statements may perhaps be respectively 
elucidated by the following examples.

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh 
the coasts of foreign lands, if by 
night he hear the roar of breakers, 
starts to vigilance, and feels just 
enough of trepidation to sharpen all 
his faculties; but under precisely 
similar circumstances, let him be 
called from his hammock to view his 
ship sailing through a midnight sea of 
milky whiteness—as if from encircling 
headlands shoals of combed white bears 
were swimming round him, then he feels 
a silent, superstitious dread; the 
shrouded phantom of the whitened waters 
is horrible to him as a real ghost; in 
vain the lead assures him he is still 
off soundings; heart and helm they both 
go down; he never rests till blue water 
is under him again. Yet where is the 
mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it 
was not so much the fear of striking 
hidden rocks, as the fear of that 
hideous whiteness that so stirred me?”

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, 
the continual sight of the snowhowdahed 
Andes conveys naught of dread, except, 
perhaps, in the mere fancying of the 
eternal frosted desolateness reigning 
at such vast altitudes, and the natural 
conceit of what a fearfulness it would 
be to lose oneself in such inhuman 
solitudes. Much the same is it with the 
backwoodsman of the West, who with 
comparative indifference views an 
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven 
snow, no shadow of tree or twig to 
break the fixed trance of whiteness. 
Not so the sailor, beholding the 
scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at 
times, by some infernal trick of 
legerdemain in the powers of frost and 
air, he, shivering and half 
shipwrecked, instead of rainbows 
speaking hope and solace to his misery, 
views what seems a boundless churchyard 
grinning upon him with its lean ice 
monuments and splintered crosses.

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

Tell me, why this strong young colt, 
foaled in some peaceful valley of 
Vermont, far removed from all beasts of 
prey—why is it that upon the sunniest 
day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo 
robe behind him, so that he cannot even 
see it, but only smells its wild animal 
muskiness—why will he start, snort, and 
with bursting eyes paw the ground in 
phrensies of affright? There is no 
remembrance in him of any gorings of 
wild creatures in his green northern 
home, so that the strange muskiness he 
smells cannot recall to him anything 
associated with the experience of 
former perils; for what knows he, this 
New England colt, of the black bisons 
of distant Oregon?

No; but here thou beholdest even in a 
dumb brute, the instinct of the 
knowledge of the demonism in the world. 
Though thousands of miles from Oregon, 
still when he smells that savage musk, 
the rending, goring bison herds are as 
present as to the deserted wild foal of 
the prairies, which this instant they 
may be trampling into dust.

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a 
milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the 
festooned frosts of mountains; the 
desolate shiftings of the windrowed 
snows of prairies; all these, to 
Ishmael, are as the shaking of that 
buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

Though neither knows where lie the 
nameless things of which the mystic 
sign gives forth such hints; yet with 
me, as with the colt, somewhere those 
things must exist. Though in many of 
its aspects this visible world seems 
formed in love, the invisible spheres 
were formed in fright.

But not yet have we solved the 
incantation of this whiteness, and 
learned why it appeals with such power 
to the soul; and more strange and far 
more portentous—why, as we have seen, 
it is at once the most meaning symbol 
of spiritual things, nay, the very veil 
of the Christian’s Deity; and yet 
should be as it is, the intensifying 
agent in things the most appalling to 
mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it 
shadows forth the heartless voids and 
immensities of the universe, and thus 
stabs us from behind with the thought 
of annihilation, when beholding the 
white depths of the milky way? Or is 
it, that as in essence whiteness is not 
so much a colour as the visible absence 
of colour; and at the same time the 
concrete of all colours; is it for 
these reasons that there is such a dumb 
blankness, full of meaning, in a wide 
landscape of snows—a colourless, 
all-colour of atheism from which we 
shrink? And when we consider that other 
theory of the natural philosophers, 
that all other earthly hues—every 
stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet 
tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, 
and the gilded velvets of butterflies, 
and the butterfly cheeks of young 
girls; all these are but subtile 
deceits, not actually inherent in 
substances, but only laid on from 
without; so that all deified Nature 
absolutely paints like the harlot, 
whose allurements cover nothing but the 
charnel-house within; and when we 
proceed further, and consider that the 
mystical cosmetic which produces every 
one of her hues, the great principle of 
light, for ever remains white or 
colourless in itself, and if operating 
without medium upon matter, would touch 
all objects, even tulips and roses, 
with its own blank tinge—pondering all 
this, the palsied universe lies before 
us a leper; and like wilful travellers 
in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured 
and colouring glasses upon their eyes, 
so the wretched infidel gazes himself 
blind at the monumental white shroud 
that wraps all the prospect around him. 
And of all these things the Albino 
whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at 
the fiery hunt? 

 

CHAPTER 43. 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, a Cholo, the 
words above.

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

“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 a cough.”

“Cough be damned! Pass along that 
return bucket.”

“There again—there it is!—it sounds 
like two or three sleepers turning 
over, now!”

“Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? 
It’s the three soaked biscuits ye eat 
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 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 44. The Chart.

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 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 before it, 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.

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. 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.

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.

So assured, indeed, is the fact 
concerning the periodicalness of the 
sperm whale’s resorting to given 
waters, that many hunters believe that, 
could he be closely observed and 
studied throughout the world; were the 
logs for one voyage of the entire whale 
fleet carefully collated, then the 
migrations of the sperm whale would be 
found to correspond in invariability to 
those of the herring-shoals or the 
flights of swallows. On this hint, 
attempts have been made to construct 
elaborate migratory charts of the sperm 
whale.*

 *Since the above was written, the 
statement is happily borne out by an 
official circular, issued by Lieutenant 
Maury, of the National Observatory, 
Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that 
circular, it appears that precisely 
such a chart is in course of 
completion; and portions of it are 
presented in the circular. “This chart 
divides the ocean into districts of 
five degrees of latitude by five 
degrees of longitude; perpendicularly 
through each of which districts are 
twelve columns for the twelve months; 
and horizontally through each of which 
districts are three lines; one to show 
the number of days that have been spent 
in each month in every district, and 
the two others to show the number of 
days in which whales, sperm or right, 
have been seen.” 

Besides, when making a passage from one 
feeding-ground to another, the sperm 
whales, guided by some infallible 
instinct—say, rather, secret 
intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim 
in veins, as they are called; 
continuing their way along a given 
ocean-line with such undeviating 
exactitude, that no ship ever sailed 
her course, by any chart, with one 
tithe of such marvellous precision. 
Though, in these cases, the direction 
taken by any one whale be straight as a 
surveyor’s parallel, and though the 
line of advance be strictly confined to 
its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet 
the arbitrary vein in which at these 
times he is said to swim, generally 
embraces some few miles in width (more 
or less, as the vein is presumed to 
expand or contract); but never exceeds 
the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s 
mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding 
along this magic zone. The sum is, that 
at particular seasons within that 
breadth and along that path, migrating 
whales may with great confidence be 
looked for.

And hence not only at substantiated 
times, upon well known separate 
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to 
encounter his prey; but in crossing the 
widest expanses of water between those 
grounds he could, by his art, so place 
and time himself on his way, as even 
then not to be wholly without prospect 
of a meeting.

There was a circumstance which at first 
sight seemed to entangle his delirious 
but still methodical scheme. But not so 
in the reality, perhaps. Though the 
gregarious sperm whales have their 
regular seasons for particular grounds, 
yet in general you cannot conclude that 
the herds which haunted such and such a 
latitude or longitude this year, say, 
will turn out to be identically the 
same with those that were found there 
the preceding season; though there are 
peculiar and unquestionable instances 
where the contrary of this has proved 
true. In general, the same remark, only 
within a less wide limit, applies to 
the solitaries and hermits among the 
matured, aged sperm whales. So that 
though Moby Dick had in a former year 
been seen, for example, on what is 
called the Seychelle ground in the 
Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the 
Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, 
that were the Pequod to visit either of 
those spots at any subsequent 
corresponding season, she would 
infallibly encounter him there. So, 
too, with some other feeding grounds, 
where he had at times revealed himself. 
But all these seemed only his casual 
stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to 
speak, not his places of prolonged 
abode. And where Ahab’s chances of 
accomplishing his object have hitherto 
been spoken of, allusion has only been 
made to whatever way-side, antecedent, 
extra prospects were his, ere a 
particular set time or place were 
attained, when all possibilities would 
become probabilities, 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. For 
there and then, for several consecutive 
years, Moby Dick had been periodically 
descried, lingering in those waters for 
awhile, as the sun, in its annual 
round, loiters for a predicted interval 
in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it 
was, too, that most of the deadly 
encounters with the white whale had 
taken place; there the waves were 
storied with his deeds; there also was 
that tragic spot where the monomaniac 
old man had found the awful motive to 
his vengeance. But in the cautious 
comprehensiveness and unloitering 
vigilance with which Ahab threw his 
brooding soul into this unfaltering 
hunt, he would not permit himself to 
rest all his hopes upon the one 
crowning fact above mentioned, however 
flattering it might be to those hopes; 
nor in the sleeplessness of his vow 
could he so tranquillize his unquiet 
heart as to postpone all intervening 
quest.

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 have I not tallied 
the whale, Ahab would mutter to 
himself, as after poring over his 
charts till long after midnight he 
would throw himself back in 
reveries—tallied him, and shall he 
escape? His broad fins are bored, and 
scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear! 
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 revengeful desire. He sleeps 
with clenched hands; and wakes with his 
own bloody nails in his palms.

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 
living light, to be sure, but without 
an object to colour, and therefore a 
blankness in itself. God help thee, old 
man, thy thoughts have created a 
creature in thee; and he whose intense 
thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a 
vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; 
that vulture the very creature he 
creates. 

 

CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.

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 sperm whales, the 
foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, 
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.

I care not to perform this part of my 
task methodically; but shall be content 
to produce the desired impression by 
separate citations of items, 
practically or reliably known to me as 
a whaleman; and from these citations, I 
take it—the conclusion aimed at will 
naturally follow of itself.

First: I have personally known three 
instances where a whale, after 
receiving a harpoon, has effected a 
complete escape; and, after an interval 
(in one instance of three years), has 
been again struck by the same hand, and 
slain; when the two irons, both marked 
by the same private cypher, have been 
taken from the body. In the instance 
where three years intervened between 
the flinging of the two harpoons; and I 
think it may have been something more 
than that; the man who darted them 
happening, in the interval, to go in a 
trading ship on a voyage to Africa, 
went ashore there, joined a discovery 
party, and penetrated far into the 
interior, where he travelled for a 
period of nearly two years, often 
endangered by serpents, savages, 
tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the 
other common perils incident to 
wandering in the heart of unknown 
regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had 
struck must also have been on its 
travels; no doubt it had thrice 
circumnavigated the globe, brushing 
with its flanks all the coasts of 
Africa; but to no purpose. This man and 
this whale again came together, and the 
one vanquished the other. I say I, 
myself, have known three instances 
similar to this; that is in two of them 
I saw the whales struck; and, upon the 
second attack, saw the two irons with 
the respective marks cut in them, 
afterwards taken from the dead fish. In 
the three-year instance, it so fell out 
that I was in the boat both times, 
first and last, and the last time 
distinctly recognised a peculiar sort 
of huge mole under the whale’s eye, 
which I had observed there three years 
previous. I say three years, but I am 
pretty sure it was more than that. Here 
are three instances, then, which I 
personally know the truth of; but I 
have heard of many other instances from 
persons whose veracity in the matter 
there is no good ground to impeach.

Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm 
Whale Fishery, however ignorant the 
world ashore may be of it, that there 
have been several memorable historical 
instances where a particular whale in 
the ocean has been at distant times and 
places popularly cognisable. Why such a 
whale became thus marked was not 
altogether and originally owing to his 
bodily peculiarities as distinguished 
from other whales; for however peculiar 
in that respect any chance whale may 
be, they soon put an end to his 
peculiarities by killing him, and 
boiling him down into a peculiarly 
valuable oil. No: the reason was this: 
that from the fatal experiences of the 
fishery there hung a terrible prestige 
of perilousness about such a whale as 
there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, 
insomuch that most fishermen were 
content to recognise him by merely 
touching their tarpaulins when he would 
be discovered lounging by them on the 
sea, without seeking to cultivate a 
more intimate acquaintance. Like some 
poor devils ashore that happen to know 
an irascible great man, they make 
distant unobtrusive salutations to him 
in the street, lest if they pursued the 
acquaintance further, they might 
receive a summary thump for their 
presumption.

But not only did each of these famous 
whales enjoy great individual 
celebrity—Nay, you may call it an 
ocean-wide renown; not only was he 
famous in life and now is immortal in 
forecastle stories after death, but he 
was admitted into all the rights, 
privileges, and distinctions of a name; 
had as much a name indeed as Cambyses 
or Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom! 
thou famed leviathan, scarred like an 
iceberg, who so long did’st lurk in the 
Oriental straits of that name, whose 
spout was oft seen from the palmy beach 
of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand 
Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that 
crossed their wakes in the vicinity of 
the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O 
Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet 
they say at times assumed the semblance 
of a snow-white cross against the sky? 
Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou 
Chilian whale, marked like an old 
tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon 
the back! In plain prose, here are four 
whales as well known to the students of 
Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to 
the classic scholar.

But this is not all. New Zealand Tom 
and Don Miguel, after at various times 
creating great havoc among the boats of 
different vessels, were finally gone in 
quest of, systematically hunted out, 
chased and killed by valiant whaling 
captains, who heaved up their anchors 
with that express object as much in 
view, as in setting out through the 
Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of 
old had it in his mind to capture that 
notorious murderous savage Annawon, the 
headmost warrior of the Indian King 
Philip.

I do not know where I can find a better 
place than just here, to make mention 
of one or two other things, which to me 
seem important, as in printed form 
establishing in all respects the 
reasonableness of the whole story of 
the White Whale, more especially the 
catastrophe. For this is one of those 
disheartening instances where truth 
requires full as much bolstering as 
error. So ignorant are most landsmen of 
some of the plainest and most palpable 
wonders of the world, that without some 
hints touching the plain facts, 
historical and otherwise, of the 
fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick 
as a monstrous fable, or still worse 
and more detestable, a hideous and 
intolerable allegory.

First: Though most men have some vague 
flitting ideas of the general perils of 
the grand fishery, yet they have 
nothing like a fixed, vivid conception 
of those perils, and the frequency with 
which they recur. One reason perhaps 
is, that not one in fifty of the actual 
disasters and deaths by casualties in 
the fishery, ever finds a public record 
at home, however transient and 
immediately forgotten that record. Do 
you suppose that that poor fellow 
there, who this moment perhaps caught 
by the whale-line off the coast of New 
Guinea, is being carried down to the 
bottom of the sea by the sounding 
leviathan—do you suppose that that poor 
fellow’s name will appear in the 
newspaper obituary you will read 
to-morrow at your breakfast? No: 
because the mails are very irregular 
between here and New Guinea. In fact, 
did you ever hear what might be called 
regular news direct or indirect from 
New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon 
one particular voyage which I made to 
the Pacific, among many others we spoke 
thirty different ships, every one of 
which had had a death by a whale, some 
of them more than one, and three that 
had each lost a boat’s crew. For God’s 
sake, be economical with your lamps and 
candles! not a gallon you burn, but at 
least one drop of man’s blood was 
spilled for it.

Secondly: People ashore have indeed 
some indefinite idea that a whale is an 
enormous creature of enormous power; 
but I have ever found that when 
narrating to them some specific example 
of this two-fold enormousness, they 
have significantly complimented me upon 
my facetiousness; when, I declare upon 
my soul, I had no more idea of being 
facetious than Moses, when he wrote the 
history of the plagues of Egypt.

But fortunately the special point I 
here seek can be established upon 
testimony entirely independent of my 
own. That point is this: The Sperm 
Whale is in some cases sufficiently 
powerful, knowing, and judiciously 
malicious, as with direct aforethought 
to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink 
a large ship; and what is more, the 
Sperm Whale has done it.

First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, 
Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was 
cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day 
she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and 
gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. 
Ere long, several of the whales were 
wounded; when, suddenly, a very large 
whale escaping from the boats, issued 
from the shoal, and bore directly down 
upon the ship. Dashing his forehead 
against her hull, he so stove her in, 
that in less than “ten minutes” she 
settled down and fell over. Not a 
surviving plank of her has been seen 
since. After the severest exposure, 
part of the crew reached the land in 
their boats. Being returned home at 
last, Captain Pollard once more sailed 
for the Pacific in command of another 
ship, but the gods shipwrecked him 
again upon unknown rocks and breakers; 
for the second time his ship was 
utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing 
the sea, he has never tempted it since. 
At this day Captain Pollard is a 
resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen 
Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex 
at the time of the tragedy; I have read 
his plain and faithful narrative; I 
have conversed with his son; and all 
this within a few miles of the scene of 
the catastrophe.*

*The following are extracts from 
Chace’s narrative: “Every fact seemed 
to warrant me in concluding that it was 
anything but chance which directed his 
operations; he made two several attacks 
upon the ship, at a short interval 
between them, both of which, according 
to their direction, were calculated to 
do us the most injury, by being made 
ahead, and thereby combining the speed 
of the two objects for the shock; to 
effect which, the exact manoeuvres 
which he made were necessary. His 
aspect was most horrible, and such as 
indicated resentment and fury. He came 
directly from the shoal which we had 
just before entered, and in which we 
had struck three of his companions, as 
if fired with revenge for their 
sufferings.” Again: “At all events, the 
whole circumstances taken together, all 
happening before my own eyes, and 
producing, at the time, impressions in 
my mind of decided, calculating 
mischief, on the part of the whale 
(many of which impressions I cannot now 
recall), induce me to be satisfied that 
I am correct in my opinion.”

Here are his reflections some time 
after quitting the ship, during a black 
night in an open boat, when almost 
despairing of reaching any hospitable 
shore. “The dark ocean and swelling 
waters were nothing; the fears of being 
swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, 
or dashed upon hidden rocks, with all 
the other ordinary subjects of fearful 
contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled 
to a moment’s thought; the dismal 
looking wreck, and the horrid aspect 
and revenge of the whale, wholly 
engrossed my reflections, until day 
again made its appearance.”

In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of 
“the mysterious and mortal attack of 
the animal.”

Secondly: The ship Union, also of 
Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally 
lost off the Azores by a similar onset, 
but the authentic particulars of this 
catastrophe I have never chanced to 
encounter, though from the whale 
hunters I have now and then heard 
casual allusions to it.

Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years 
ago Commodore J—-, then commanding an 
American sloop-of-war of the first 
class, happened to be dining with a 
party of whaling captains, on board a 
Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, 
Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning 
upon whales, the Commodore was pleased 
to be sceptical touching the amazing 
strength ascribed to them by the 
professional gentlemen present. He 
peremptorily denied for example, that 
any whale could so smite his stout 
sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so 
much as a thimbleful. Very good; but 
there is more coming. Some weeks after, 
the Commodore set sail in this 
impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But 
he was stopped on the way by a portly 
sperm whale, that begged a few moments’ 
confidential business with him. That 
business consisted in fetching the 
Commodore’s craft such a thwack, that 
with all his pumps going he made 
straight for the nearest port to heave 
down and repair. I am not 
superstitious, but I consider the 
Commodore’s interview with that whale 
as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus 
converted from unbelief by a similar 
fright? I tell you, the sperm whale 
will stand no nonsense.

I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s 
Voyages for a little circumstance in 
point, peculiarly interesting to the 
writer hereof. Langsdorff, you must 
know by the way, was attached to the 
Russian Admiral Krusenstern’s famous 
Discovery Expedition in the beginning 
of the present century. Captain 
Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth 
chapter:

“By the thirteenth of May our ship was 
ready to sail, and the next day we were 
out in the open sea, on our way to 
Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and 
fine, but so intolerably cold that we 
were obliged to keep on our fur 
clothing. For some days we had very 
little wind; it was not till the 
nineteenth that a brisk gale from the 
northwest sprang up. An uncommon large 
whale, the body of which was larger 
than the ship itself, lay almost at the 
surface of the water, but was not 
perceived by any one on board till the 
moment when the ship, which was in full 
sail, was almost upon him, so that it 
was impossible to prevent its striking 
against him. We were thus placed in the 
most imminent danger, as this gigantic 
creature, setting up its back, raised 
the ship three feet at least out of the 
water. The masts reeled, and the sails 
fell altogether, while we who were 
below all sprang instantly upon the 
deck, concluding that we had struck 
upon some rock; instead of this we saw 
the monster sailing off with the utmost 
gravity and solemnity. Captain D’Wolf 
applied immediately to the pumps to 
examine whether or not the vessel had 
received any damage from the shock, but 
we found that very happily it had 
escaped entirely uninjured.”

Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to 
as commanding the ship in question, is 
a New Englander, who, after a long life 
of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, 
this day resides in the village of 
Dorchester near Boston. I have the 
honour of being a nephew of his. I have 
particularly questioned him concerning 
this passage in Langsdorff. He 
substantiates every word. The ship, 
however, was by no means a large one: a 
Russian craft built on the Siberian 
coast, and purchased by my uncle after 
bartering away the vessel in which he 
sailed from home.

In that up and down manly book of 
old-fashioned adventure, so full, too, 
of honest wonders—the voyage of Lionel 
Wafer, one of ancient Dampier’s old 
chums—I found a little matter set down 
so like that just quoted from 
Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear 
inserting it here for a corroborative 
example, if such be needed.

Lionel, it seems, was on his way to 
“John Ferdinando,” as he calls the 
modern Juan Fernandes. “In our way 
thither,” he says, “about four o’clock 
in the morning, when we were about one 
hundred and fifty leagues from the Main 
of America, our ship felt a terrible 
shock, which put our men in such 
consternation that they could hardly 
tell where they were or what to think; 
but every one began to prepare for 
death. And, indeed, the shock was so 
sudden and violent, that we took it for 
granted the ship had struck against a 
rock; but when the amazement was a 
little over, we cast the lead, and 
sounded, but found no ground..... The 
suddenness of the shock made the guns 
leap in their carriages, and several of 
the men were shaken out of their 
hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with 
his head on a gun, was thrown out of 
his cabin!” Lionel then goes on to 
impute the shock to an earthquake, and 
seems to substantiate the imputation by 
stating that a great earthquake, 
somewhere about that time, did actually 
do great mischief along the Spanish 
land. But I should not much wonder if, 
in the darkness of that early hour of 
the morning, the shock was after all 
caused by an unseen whale vertically 
bumping the hull from beneath.

I might proceed with several more 
examples, one way or another known to 
me, of the great power and malice at 
times of the sperm whale. In more than 
one instance, he has been known, not 
only to chase the assailing boats back 
to their ships, but to pursue the ship 
itself, and long withstand all the 
lances hurled at him from its decks. 
The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a 
story on that head; and, as for his 
strength, let me say, that there have 
been examples where the lines attached 
to a running sperm whale have, in a 
calm, been transferred to the ship, and 
secured there; the whale towing her 
great hull through the water, as a 
horse walks off with a cart. Again, it 
is very often observed that, if the 
sperm whale, once struck, is allowed 
time to rally, he then acts, not so 
often with blind rage, as with wilful, 
deliberate designs of destruction to 
his pursuers; nor is it without 
conveying some eloquent indication of 
his character, that upon being attacked 
he will frequently open his mouth, and 
retain it in that dread expansion for 
several consecutive minutes. But I must 
be content with only one more and a 
concluding illustration; a remarkable 
and most significant one, by which you 
will not fail to see, that not only is 
the most marvellous event in this book 
corroborated by plain facts of the 
present day, but that these marvels 
(like all marvels) are mere repetitions 
of the ages; so that for the millionth 
time we say amen with Solomon—Verily 
there is nothing new under the sun.

In the sixth Christian century lived 
Procopius, a Christian magistrate of 
Constantinople, in the days when 
Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius 
general. As many know, he wrote the 
history of his own times, a work every 
way of uncommon value. By the best 
authorities, he has always been 
considered a most trustworthy and 
unexaggerating historian, except in 
some one or two particulars, not at all 
affecting the matter presently to be 
mentioned.

Now, in this history of his, Procopius 
mentions that, during the term of his 
prefecture at Constantinople, a great 
sea-monster was captured in the 
neighboring Propontis, or Sea of 
Marmora, after having destroyed vessels 
at intervals in those waters for a 
period of more than fifty years. A fact 
thus set down in substantial history 
cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there 
any reason it should be. Of what 
precise species this sea-monster was, 
is not mentioned. But as he destroyed 
ships, as well as for other reasons, he 
must have been a whale; and I am 
strongly inclined to think a sperm 
whale. And I will tell you why. For a 
long time I fancied that the sperm 
whale had been always unknown in the 
Mediterranean and the deep waters 
connecting with it. Even now I am 
certain that those seas are not, and 
perhaps never can be, in the present 
constitution of things, a place for his 
habitual gregarious resort. But further 
investigations have recently proved to 
me, that in modern times there have 
been isolated instances of the presence 
of the sperm whale in the 
Mediterranean. I am told, on good 
authority, that on the Barbary coast, a 
Commodore Davis of the British navy 
found the skeleton of a sperm whale. 
Now, as a vessel of war readily passes 
through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm 
whale could, by the same route, pass 
out of the Mediterranean into the 
Propontis.

In the Propontis, as far as I can 
learn, none of that peculiar substance 
called brit is to be found, the aliment 
of the right whale. But I have every 
reason to believe that the food of the 
sperm whale—squid or cuttle-fish—lurks 
at the bottom of that sea, because 
large creatures, but by no means the 
largest of that sort, have been found 
at its surface. If, then, you properly 
put these statements together, and 
reason upon them a bit, you will 
clearly perceive that, according to all 
human reasoning, Procopius’s 
sea-monster, that for half a century 
stove the ships of a Roman Emperor, 
must in all probability have been a 
sperm whale. 

 

CHAPTER 46. Surmises.

Though, consumed with the hot fire of 
his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts 
and actions ever had in view the 
ultimate capture of Moby Dick; though 
he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal 
interests to that one passion; 
nevertheless it may have been that he 
was by nature and long habituation far 
too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways, 
altogether to abandon the collateral 
prosecution of the voyage. 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 one he hunted. But if such an 
hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, 
there were still additional 
considerations which, though not so 
strictly according with the wildness of 
his ruling passion, yet were by no 
means incapable of swaying him.

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 
stand 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. Not only that, but 
the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting 
Moby Dick was noways more significantly 
manifested than in his superlative 
sense and shrewdness in foreseeing 
that, for the present, the hunt should 
in some way be stripped of that strange 
imaginative impiousness which naturally 
invested it; that the full terror of 
the voyage must be kept withdrawn into 
the obscure background (for few men’s 
courage is proof against protracted 
meditation unrelieved by action); that 
when they stood their long night 
watches, his officers and men must have 
some nearer things to think of than 
Moby Dick. For however eagerly and 
impetuously the savage crew had hailed 
the announcement of his quest; yet all 
sailors of all sorts are more or less 
capricious and unreliable—they live in 
the varying outer weather, and they 
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 them healthily 
suspended for the final dash.

Nor was Ahab unmindful of another 
thing. In times of strong emotion 
mankind disdain all base 
considerations; but such times are 
evanescent. The permanent 
constitutional condition of the 
manufactured man, thought Ahab, is 
sordidness. 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—that 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. They may scorn cash now; but let 
some months go by, and no perspective 
promise of it to them, and then this 
same quiescent cash all at once 
mutinying in them, this same cash would 
soon cashier Ahab.

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 too analytic to be verbally 
developed here, 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 47. The Mat-Maker.

It was a cloudy, sultry 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: 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.

Thus we were weaving and weaving away 
when I started at a sound so strange, 
long drawn, and musically wild and 
unearthly, that the ball of free will 
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. To be sure the same sound was 
that very moment perhaps being heard 
all over the seas, from hundreds of 
whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in 
the air; but from few of those lungs 
could that accustomed old cry have 
derived such a marvellous cadence as 
from Tashtego the Indian’s.

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. For that singular craft at times 
evinced by the Sperm Whale when, 
sounding with his head in one 
direction, he nevertheless, while 
concealed beneath the surface, mills 
round, and swiftly swims off in the 
opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of 
his could not now be in action; for 
there was no reason to suppose that the 
fish seen by Tashtego had been in any 
way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of 
our vicinity. 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 samphire 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. 
So look the long line of man-of-war’s 
men about to throw themselves on board 
an enemy’s ship.

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 48. The 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 living hair braided and 
coiled round and round upon his head. 
Less swart in aspect, the companions of 
this figure were of that vivid, 
tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to 
some of the aboriginal natives of the 
Manillas;—a race notorious for a 
certain diabolism of subtilty, and by 
some honest white mariners supposed to 
be the paid spies and secret 
confidential agents on the water of the 
devil, their lord, whose counting-room 
they suppose to be elsewhere.

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

“Ready,” was the half-hissed reply.

“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 sheaves whirled 
round in the 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? And didn’t I tell 
Cabaco here of it? What say ye, Cabaco? 
They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.”

“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. 
They were hidden down there. 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 
shadows I had seen creeping on board 
the Pequod during the dim Nantucket 
dawn, as well as the enigmatical 
hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.

Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his 
officers, having sided the furthest to 
windward, 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; while at the other end of the 
boat Ahab, with one arm, like a 
fencer’s, thrown half backward into the 
air, as if to counterbalance any 
tendency to trip; Ahab was seen 
steadily managing his steering oar as 
in a thousand boat lowerings ere the 
White Whale had torn him. 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 negro, stooping a 
little, presented his flat palm to 
Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s 
hand on his hearse-plumed head and 
bidding him spring as he himself should 
toss, with one dexterous fling landed 
the little man high and dry on his 
shoulders. 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, barbaric majesty, the 
noble negro to every roll of the sea 
harmoniously rolled his fine form. On 
his broad 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 the 
negro’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, it seems, 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 blessed light of 
the evangelical land. Only the infidel 
sharks in the audacious seas may give 
ear to such words, when, with tornado 
brow, and 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; 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. 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 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 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 waves 
dashed their bucklers together; the 
whole squall roared, forked, and 
crackled around us like a white fire 
upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, 
we were burning; immortal in these jaws 
of death! In vain we hailed the other 
boats; as well roar to the live coals 
down the chimney of a flaming furnace 
as hail those boats in that storm. 
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 
were useless as propellers, performing 
now 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. There, then, he 
sat, the sign and symbol of a man 
without faith, hopelessly holding up 
hope in the midst of despair.

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. 

 

CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.

There are certain queer times and 
occasions in this strange mixed affair 
we call life when a man takes this 
whole universe for a vast practical 
joke, though the wit thereof he but 
dimly discerns, and more than suspects 
that the joke is at nobody’s expense 
but his own. However, nothing 
dispirits, and nothing seems worth 
while disputing. He bolts down all 
events, all creeds, and beliefs, and 
persuasions, all hard things visible 
and invisible, never mind how knobby; 
as an ostrich of potent digestion 
gobbles down bullets and gun flints. 
And as for small difficulties and 
worryings, prospects of sudden 
disaster, peril of life and limb; all 
these, and death itself, seem to him 
only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly 
punches in the side bestowed by the 
unseen and unaccountable old joker. 
That odd sort of wayward mood I am 
speaking of, comes over a man only in 
some time of extreme tribulation; it 
comes in the very midst of his 
earnestness, so that what just before 
might have seemed to him a thing most 
momentous, now seems but a part of the 
general joke. There is nothing like the 
perils of whaling to breed this free 
and easy sort of genial, desperado 
philosophy; and with it I now regarded 
this whole voyage of the Pequod, and 
the great White Whale its object.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It may seem strange that of all men 
sailors should be tinkering at their 
last wills and testaments, but there 
are no people in the world more fond of 
that diversion. This was the fourth 
time in my nautical life that I had 
done the same thing. After the ceremony 
was concluded upon the present 
occasion, I felt all the easier; a 
stone was rolled away from my heart. 
Besides, all the days I should now live 
would be as good as the days that 
Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a 
supplementary clean gain of so many 
months or weeks as the case might be. I 
survived myself; my death and burial 
were locked up in my chest. I looked 
round me tranquilly and contentedly, 
like a quiet ghost with a clean 
conscience sitting inside the bars of a 
snug family vault.

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

 

CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. 
Fedallah.

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

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

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

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

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

Ahab well knew that although his 
friends at home would think little of 
his entering a boat in certain 
comparatively harmless vicissitudes of 
the chase, for the sake of being near 
the scene of action and giving his 
orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab 
to have a boat actually apportioned to 
him as a regular headsman in the 
hunt—above all for Captain Ahab to be 
supplied with five extra men, as that 
same boat’s crew, he well knew that 
such generous conceits never entered 
the heads of the owners of the Pequod. 
Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s 
crew from them, nor had he in any way 
hinted his desires on that head. 
Nevertheless he had taken private 
measures of his own touching all that 
matter. Until Cabaco’s published 
discovery, the sailors had little 
foreseen it, though to be sure when, 
after being a little while out of port, 
all hands had concluded the customary 
business of fitting the whaleboats for 
service; when some time after this Ahab 
was now and then found bestirring 
himself in the matter of making 
thole-pins with his own hands for what 
was thought to be one of the spare 
boats, and even solicitously cutting 
the small wooden skewers, which when 
the line is running out are pinned over 
the groove in the bow: when all this 
was observed in him, and particularly 
his solicitude in having an extra coat 
of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, 
as if to make it better withstand the 
pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and 
also the anxiety he evinced in exactly 
shaping the thigh board, or clumsy 
cleat, as it is sometimes called, the 
horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for 
bracing the knee against in darting or 
stabbing at the whale; when it was 
observed how often he stood up in that 
boat with his solitary knee fixed in 
the semi-circular depression in the 
cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel 
gouged out a little here and 
straightened it a little there; all 
these things, I say, had awakened much 
interest and curiosity at the time. But 
almost everybody supposed that this 
particular preparative heedfulness in 
Ahab must only be with a view to the 
ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had 
already revealed his intention to hunt 
that mortal monster in person. But such 
a supposition did by no means involve 
the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s 
crew being assigned to that boat.

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; all 
this none knew. But one cannot sustain 
an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. 
He was such a creature as civilized, 
domestic people in the temperate zone 
only see in their dreams, and that but 
dimly; but the like of whom now and 
then glide among the unchanging Asiatic 
communities, especially the Oriental 
isles to the east of the 
continent—those insulated, immemorial, 
unalterable countries, which even in 
these modern days still preserve much 
of the ghostly aboriginalness of 
earth’s primal generations, when the 
memory of the first man was a distinct 
recollection, and all men his 
descendants, unknowing whence he came, 
eyed each other as real phantoms, and 
asked of the sun and the moon why they 
were created and to what end; when 
though, according to Genesis, the 
angels indeed consorted with the 
daughters of men, the devils also, add 
the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in 
mundane amours. 

 

CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.

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

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

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

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

Nor with the immemorial superstition of 
their race, and in accordance with the 
preternaturalness, as it seemed, which 
in many things invested the Pequod, 
were there wanting some of the seamen 
who swore that whenever and wherever 
descried; at however remote times, or 
in however far apart latitudes and 
longitudes, that unnearable spout was 
cast by one self-same whale; and that 
whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there 
reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread 
at this flitting apparition, as if it 
were treacherously beckoning us on and 
on, in order that the monster might 
turn round upon us, and rend us at last 
in the remotest and most savage seas.

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

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

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

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

During all this blackness of the 
elements, Ahab, though assuming for the 
time the almost continual command of 
the drenched and dangerous deck, 
manifested the gloomiest reserve; and 
more seldom than ever addressed his 
mates. In tempestuous times like these, 
after everything above and aloft has 
been secured, nothing more can be done 
but passively to await the issue of the 
gale. Then Captain and crew become 
practical fatalists. So, with his ivory 
leg inserted into its accustomed hole, 
and with one hand firmly grasping a 
shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would 
stand gazing dead to windward, while an 
occasional squall of sleet or snow 
would all but congeal his very 
eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew 
driven from the forward part of the 
ship by the perilous seas that 
burstingly broke over its bows, stood 
in a line along the bulwarks in the 
waist; and the better to guard against 
the leaping waves, each man had slipped 
himself into a sort of bowline secured 
to the rail, in which he swung as in a 
loosened belt. Few or no words were 
spoken; and the silent ship, as if 
manned by painted sailors in wax, day 
after day tore on through all the swift 
madness and gladness of the demoniac 
waves. By night the same muteness of 
humanity before the shrieks of the 
ocean prevailed; still in silence the 
men swung in the bowlines; still 
wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. 
Even when wearied nature seemed 
demanding repose he would not seek that 
repose in his hammock. Never could 
Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, 
when one night going down into the 
cabin to mark how the barometer stood, 
he saw him with closed eyes sitting 
straight in his floor-screwed chair; 
the rain and half-melted sleet of the 
storm from which he had some time 
before emerged, still slowly dripping 
from the unremoved hat and coat. On the 
table beside him lay unrolled one of 
those charts of tides and currents 
which have previously been spoken of. 
His lantern swung from his tightly 
clenched hand. Though the body was 
erect, the head was thrown back so that 
the closed eyes were pointed towards 
the needle of the tell-tale that swung 
from a beam in the ceiling.*

*The cabin-compass is called the 
tell-tale, because without going to the 
compass at the helm, the Captain, while 
below, can inform himself of the course 
of the ship.

Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with 
a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still 
thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose. 

 

CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round the world! There is much in that 
sound to inspire proud feelings; but 
whereto does all that circumnavigation 
conduct? Only through numberless perils 
to the very point whence we started, 
where those that we left behind secure, 
were all the time before us.

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

 

CHAPTER 53. The Gam.

The ostensible reason why Ahab did not 
go on board of the whaler we had spoken 
was this: the wind and sea betokened 
storms. But even had this not been the 
case, he would not after all, perhaps, 
have boarded her—judging by his 
subsequent conduct on similar 
occasions—if so it had been that, by 
the process of hailing, he had obtained 
a negative answer to the question he 
put. For, as it eventually turned out, 
he cared not to consort, even for five 
minutes, with any stranger captain, 
except he could contribute some of that 
information he so absorbingly sought. 
But all this might remain inadequately 
estimated, were not something said here 
of the peculiar usages of 
whaling-vessels when meeting each other 
in foreign seas, and especially on a 
common cruising-ground.

If two strangers crossing the Pine 
Barrens in New York State, or the 
equally desolate Salisbury Plain in 
England; if casually encountering each 
other in such inhospitable wilds, these 
twain, for the life of them, cannot 
well avoid a mutual salutation; and 
stopping for a moment to interchange 
the news; and, perhaps, sitting down 
for a while and resting in concert: 
then, how much more natural that upon 
the illimitable Pine Barrens and 
Salisbury Plains of the sea, two 
whaling vessels descrying each other at 
the ends of the earth—off lone 
Fanning’s Island, or the far away 
King’s Mills; how much more natural, I 
say, that under such circumstances 
these ships should not only interchange 
hails, but come into still closer, more 
friendly and sociable contact. And 
especially would this seem to be a 
matter of course, in the case of 
vessels owned in one seaport, and whose 
captains, officers, and not a few of 
the men are personally known to each 
other; and consequently, have all sorts 
of dear domestic things to talk about.

For the long absent ship, the 
outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters 
on board; at any rate, she will be sure 
to let her have some papers of a date a 
year or two later than the last one on 
her blurred and thumb-worn files. And 
in return for that courtesy, the 
outward-bound ship would receive the 
latest whaling intelligence from the 
cruising-ground to which she may be 
destined, a thing of the utmost 
importance to her. And in degree, all 
this will hold true concerning whaling 
vessels crossing each other’s track on 
the cruising-ground itself, even though 
they are equally long absent from home. 
For one of them may have received a 
transfer of letters from some third, 
and now far remote vessel; and some of 
those letters may be for the people of 
the ship she now meets. Besides, they 
would exchange the whaling news, and 
have an agreeable chat. For not only 
would they meet with all the sympathies 
of sailors, but likewise with all the 
peculiar congenialities arising from a 
common pursuit and mutually shared 
privations and perils.

Nor would difference of country make 
any very essential difference; that is, 
so long as both parties speak one 
language, as is the case with Americans 
and English. Though, to be sure, from 
the small number of English whalers, 
such meetings do not very often occur, 
and when they do occur there is too apt 
to be a sort of shyness between them; 
for your Englishman is rather reserved, 
and your Yankee, he does not fancy that 
sort of thing in anybody but himself. 
Besides, the English whalers sometimes 
affect a kind of metropolitan 
superiority over the American whalers; 
regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, 
with his nondescript provincialisms, as 
a sort of sea-peasant. But where this 
superiority in the English whalemen 
does really consist, it would be hard 
to say, seeing that the Yankees in one 
day, collectively, kill more whales 
than all the English, collectively, in 
ten years. But this is a harmless 
little foible in the English 
whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer 
does not take much to heart; probably, 
because he knows that he has a few 
foibles himself.

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

But look at the godly, honest, 
unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, 
free-and-easy whaler! What does the 
whaler do when she meets another whaler 
in any sort of decent weather? She has 
a “Gam,” a thing so utterly unknown to 
all other ships that they never heard 
of the name even; and if by chance they 
should hear of it, they only grin at 
it, and repeat gamesome stuff about 
“spouters” and “blubber-boilers,” and 
such like pretty exclamations. Why it 
is that all Merchant-seamen, and also 
all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and 
Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a 
scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; 
this is a question it would be hard to 
answer. Because, in the case of 
pirates, say, I should like to know 
whether that profession of theirs has 
any peculiar glory about it. It 
sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, 
indeed; but only at the gallows. And 
besides, when a man is elevated in that 
odd fashion, he has no proper 
foundation for his superior altitude. 
Hence, I conclude, that in boasting 
himself to be high lifted above a 
whaleman, in that assertion the pirate 
has no solid basis to stand on.

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

GAM. NOUN—A social meeting of two (or 
more) 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, 
man-of-war, or slave ship, when the 
captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, 
he always sits in the stern sheets on a 
comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat 
there, and often steers himself with a 
pretty little milliner’s tiller 
decorated with gay cords and ribbons. 
But the whale-boat has no seat astern, 
no sofa of that sort whatever, and no 
tiller at all. High times indeed, if 
whaling captains were wheeled about the 
water on castors like gouty old 
aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a 
tiller, the whale-boat never admits of 
any such effeminacy; and therefore as 
in gamming a complete boat’s crew must 
leave the ship, and hence as the boat 
steerer or harpooneer is of the number, 
that subordinate is the steersman upon 
the occasion, and the captain, having 
no place to sit in, is pulled off to 
his visit all standing like a pine 
tree. And often you will notice that 
being conscious of the eyes of the 
whole visible world resting on him from 
the sides of the two ships, this 
standing captain is all alive to the 
importance of sustaining his dignity by 
maintaining his legs. Nor is this any 
very easy matter; for in his rear is 
the immense projecting steering oar 
hitting him now and then in the small 
of his back, the after-oar 
reciprocating by rapping his knees in 
front. He is thus completely wedged 
before and behind, and can only expand 
himself sideways by settling down on 
his stretched legs; but a sudden, 
violent pitch of the boat will often go 
far to topple him, because length of 
foundation is nothing without 
corresponding breadth. Merely make a 
spread angle of two poles, and you 
cannot stand them up. Then, again, it 
would never do in plain sight of the 
world’s riveted eyes, it would never 
do, I say, for this straddling captain 
to be seen steadying himself the 
slightest particle by catching hold of 
anything with his hands; indeed, as 
token of his entire, buoyant 
self-command, he generally carries his 
hands in his trowsers’ pockets; but 
perhaps being generally very large, 
heavy hands, he carries them there for 
ballast. Nevertheless there have 
occurred instances, well authenticated 
ones too, where the captain has been 
known for an uncommonly critical moment 
or two, in a sudden squall say—to seize 
hold of the nearest oarsman’s hair, and 
hold on there like grim death. 

 

CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.

(As told at the Golden Inn)

The Cape of Good Hope, and all the 
watery region round about there, is 
much like some noted four corners of a 
great highway, where you meet more 
travellers than in any other part.

It was not very long after speaking the 
Goney that another homeward-bound 
whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was 
encountered. She was manned almost 
wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam 
that ensued she gave us strong news of 
Moby Dick. To some the general interest 
in the White Whale was now wildly 
heightened by a circumstance of the 
Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely 
to involve with the whale a certain 
wondrous, inverted visitation of one of 
those so called judgments of God which 
at times are said to overtake some men. 
This latter circumstance, with its own 
particular accompaniments, forming what 
may be called the secret part of the 
tragedy about to be narrated, never 
reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his 
mates. For that secret part of the 
story was unknown to the captain of the 
Town-Ho himself. It was the private 
property of three confederate white 
seamen of that ship, one of whom, it 
seems, communicated it to Tashtego with 
Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the 
following night Tashtego rambled in his 
sleep, and revealed so much of it in 
that way, that when he was wakened he 
could not well withhold the rest. 
Nevertheless, so potent an influence 
did this thing have on those seamen in 
the Pequod who came to the full 
knowledge of it, and by such a strange 
delicacy, to call it so, were they 
governed in this matter, that they kept 
the secret among themselves so that it 
never transpired abaft the Pequod’s 
main-mast. Interweaving in its proper 
place this darker thread with the story 
as publicly narrated on the ship, the 
whole of this strange affair I now 
proceed to put on lasting record.

*The ancient whale-cry upon first 
sighting a whale from the mast-head, 
still used by whalemen in hunting the 
famous Gallipagos terrapin.

For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve 
the style in which I once narrated it 
at Lima, to a lounging circle of my 
Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, 
smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled 
piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine 
cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and 
Sebastian, were on the closer terms 
with me; and hence the interluding 
questions they occasionally put, and 
which are duly answered at the time.

“Some two years prior to my first 
learning the events which I am about 
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the 
Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was 
cruising in your Pacific here, not very 
many days’ sail eastward from the eaves 
of this good Golden Inn. She was 
somewhere to the northward of the Line. 
One morning upon handling the pumps, 
according to daily usage, it was 
observed that she made more water in 
her hold than common. They supposed a 
sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. 
But the captain, having some unusual 
reason for believing that rare good 
luck awaited him in those latitudes; 
and therefore being very averse to quit 
them, and the leak not being then 
considered at all dangerous, though, 
indeed, they could not find it after 
searching the hold as low down as was 
possible in rather heavy weather, the 
ship still continued her cruisings, the 
mariners working at the pumps at wide 
and easy intervals; but no good luck 
came; more days went by, and not only 
was the leak yet undiscovered, but it 
sensibly increased. So much so, that 
now taking some alarm, the captain, 
making all sail, stood away for the 
nearest harbor among the islands, there 
to have his hull hove out and repaired.

“Though no small passage was before 
her, yet, if the commonest chance 
favoured, he did not at all fear that 
his ship would founder by the way, 
because his pumps were of the best, and 
being periodically relieved at them, 
those six-and-thirty men of his could 
easily keep the ship free; never mind 
if the leak should double on her. In 
truth, well nigh the whole of this 
passage being attended by very 
prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all 
but certainly arrived in perfect safety 
at her port without the occurrence of 
the least fatality, had it not been for 
the brutal overbearing of Radney, the 
mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly 
provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a 
Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.

“‘Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a 
Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?’ said 
Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging 
mat of grass.

“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, 
Don; but—I crave your courtesy—may be, 
you shall soon hear further of all 
that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail 
brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh 
as large and stout as any that ever 
sailed out of your old Callao to far 
Manilla; this Lakeman, in the 
land-locked heart of our America, had 
yet been nurtured by all those agrarian 
freebooting impressions popularly 
connected with the open ocean. For in 
their interflowing aggregate, those 
grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, 
and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, 
and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like 
expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s 
noblest traits; with many of its rimmed 
varieties of races and of climes. They 
contain round archipelagoes of romantic 
isles, even as the Polynesian waters 
do; in large part, are shored by two 
great contrasting nations, as the 
Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime 
approaches to our numerous territorial 
colonies from the East, dotted all 
round their banks; here and there are 
frowned upon by batteries, and by the 
goat-like craggy guns of lofty 
Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet 
thunderings of naval victories; at 
intervals, they yield their beaches to 
wild barbarians, whose red painted 
faces flash from out their peltry 
wigwams; for leagues and leagues are 
flanked by ancient and unentered 
forests, where the gaunt pines stand 
like serried lines of kings in Gothic 
genealogies; those same woods harboring 
wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken 
creatures whose exported furs give 
robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror 
the paved capitals of Buffalo and 
Cleveland, as well as Winnebago 
villages; they float alike the 
full-rigged merchant ship, the armed 
cruiser of the State, the steamer, and 
the beech canoe; they are swept by 
Borean and dismasting blasts as direful 
as any that lash the salted wave; they 
know what shipwrecks are, for out of 
sight of land, however inland, they 
have drowned full many a midnight ship 
with all its shrieking crew. Thus, 
gentlemen, though an inlander, 
Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and 
wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an 
audacious mariner as any. And for 
Radney, though in his infancy he may 
have laid him down on the lone 
Nantucket beach, to nurse at his 
maternal sea; though in after life he 
had long followed our austere Atlantic 
and your contemplative Pacific; yet was 
he quite as vengeful and full of social 
quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh 
from the latitudes of buck-horn handled 
bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer 
a man with some good-hearted traits; 
and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though 
a sort of devil indeed, might yet by 
inflexible firmness, only tempered by 
that common decency of human 
recognition which is the meanest 
slave’s right; thus treated, this 
Steelkilt had long been retained 
harmless and docile. At all events, he 
had proved so thus far; but Radney was 
doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt—but, 
gentlemen, you shall hear.

“It was not more than a day or two at 
the furthest after pointing her prow 
for her island haven, that the 
Town-Ho’s leak seemed again increasing, 
but only so as to require an hour or 
more at the pumps every day. You must 
know that in a settled and civilized 
ocean like our Atlantic, for example, 
some skippers think little of pumping 
their whole way across it; though of a 
still, sleepy night, should the officer 
of the deck happen to forget his duty 
in that respect, the probability would 
be that he and his shipmates would 
never again remember it, on account of 
all hands gently subsiding to the 
bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage 
seas far from you to the westward, 
gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for 
ships to keep clanging at their 
pump-handles in full chorus even for a 
voyage of considerable length; that is, 
if it lie along a tolerably accessible 
coast, or if any other reasonable 
retreat is afforded them. It is only 
when a leaky vessel is in some very out 
of the way part of those waters, some 
really landless latitude, that her 
captain begins to feel a little anxious.

“Much this way had it been with the 
Town-Ho; so when her leak was found 
gaining once more, there was in truth 
some small concern manifested by 
several of her company; especially by 
Radney the mate. He commanded the upper 
sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home 
anew, and every way expanded to the 
breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was 
as little of a coward, and as little 
inclined to any sort of nervous 
apprehensiveness touching his own 
person as any fearless, unthinking 
creature on land or on sea that you can 
conveniently imagine, gentlemen. 
Therefore when he betrayed this 
solicitude about the safety of the 
ship, some of the seamen declared that 
it was only on account of his being a 
part owner in her. So when they were 
working that evening at the pumps, 
there was on this head no small 
gamesomeness slily going on among them, 
as they stood with their feet 
continually overflowed by the rippling 
clear water; clear as any mountain 
spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from 
the pumps ran across the deck, and 
poured itself out in steady spouts at 
the lee scupper-holes.

“Now, as you well know, it is not 
seldom the case in this conventional 
world of ours—watery or otherwise; that 
when a person placed in command over 
his fellow-men finds one of them to be 
very significantly his superior in 
general pride of manhood, straightway 
against that man he conceives an 
unconquerable dislike and bitterness; 
and if he have a chance he will pull 
down and pulverize that subaltern’s 
tower, and make a little heap of dust 
of it. Be this conceit of mine as it 
may, gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt 
was a tall and noble animal with a head 
like a Roman, and a flowing golden 
beard like the tasseled housings of 
your last viceroy’s snorting charger; 
and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in 
him, gentlemen, which had made 
Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born 
son to Charlemagne’s father. But 
Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; 
yet as hardy, as stubborn, as 
malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, 
and Steelkilt knew it.

“Espying the mate drawing near as he 
was toiling at the pump with the rest, 
the Lakeman affected not to notice him, 
but unawed, went on with his gay 
banterings.

“‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a 
lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one 
of ye, and let’s have a taste. By the 
Lord, it’s worth bottling! I tell ye 
what, men, old Rad’s investment must go 
for it! he had best cut away his part 
of the hull and tow it home. The fact 
is, boys, that sword-fish only began 
the job; he’s come back again with a 
gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and 
file-fish, and what not; and the whole 
posse of ‘em are now hard at work 
cutting and slashing at the bottom; 
making improvements, I suppose. If old 
Rad were here now, I’d tell him to jump 
overboard and scatter ‘em. They’re 
playing the devil with his estate, I 
can tell him. But he’s a simple old 
soul,—Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they 
say the rest of his property is 
invested in looking-glasses. I wonder 
if he’d give a poor devil like me the 
model of his nose.’

“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump 
stopping for?’ roared Radney, 
pretending not to have heard the 
sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’

“‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry 
as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys, lively, 
now!’ And with that the pump clanged 
like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed 
their hats off to it, and ere long that 
peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard 
which denotes the fullest tension of 
life’s utmost energies.

“Quitting the pump at last, with the 
rest of his band, the Lakeman went 
forward all panting, and sat himself 
down on the windlass; his face fiery 
red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the 
profuse sweat from his brow. Now what 
cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that 
possessed Radney to meddle with such a 
man in that corporeally exasperated 
state, I know not; but so it happened. 
Intolerably striding along the deck, 
the mate commanded him to get a broom 
and sweep down the planks, and also a 
shovel, and remove some offensive 
matters consequent upon allowing a pig 
to run at large.

“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck 
at sea is a piece of household work 
which in all times but raging gales is 
regularly attended to every evening; it 
has been known to be done in the case 
of ships actually foundering at the 
time. Such, gentlemen, is the 
inflexibility of sea-usages and the 
instinctive love of neatness in seamen; 
some of whom would not willingly drown 
without first washing their faces. But 
in all vessels this broom business is 
the prescriptive province of the boys, 
if boys there be aboard. Besides, it 
was the stronger men in the Town-Ho 
that had been divided into gangs, 
taking turns at the pumps; and being 
the most athletic seaman of them all, 
Steelkilt had been regularly assigned 
captain of one of the gangs; 
consequently he should have been freed 
from any trivial business not connected 
with truly nautical duties, such being 
the case with his comrades. I mention 
all these particulars so that you may 
understand exactly how this affair 
stood between the two men.

“But there was more than this: the 
order about the shovel was almost as 
plainly meant to sting and insult 
Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in 
his face. Any man who has gone sailor 
in a whale-ship will understand this; 
and all this and doubtless much more, 
the Lakeman fully comprehended when the 
mate uttered his command. But as he sat 
still for a moment, and as he 
steadfastly looked into the mate’s 
malignant eye and perceived the stacks 
of powder-casks heaped up in him and 
the slow-match silently burning along 
towards them; as he instinctively saw 
all this, that strange forbearance and 
unwillingness to stir up the deeper 
passionateness in any already ireful 
being—a repugnance most felt, when felt 
at all, by really valiant men even when 
aggrieved—this nameless phantom 
feeling, gentlemen, stole over 
Steelkilt.

“Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only 
a little broken by the bodily 
exhaustion he was temporarily in, he 
answered him saying that sweeping the 
deck was not his business, and he would 
not do it. And then, without at all 
alluding to the shovel, he pointed to 
three lads as the customary sweepers; 
who, not being billeted at the pumps, 
had done little or nothing all day. To 
this, Radney replied with an oath, in a 
most domineering and outrageous manner 
unconditionally reiterating his 
command; meanwhile advancing upon the 
still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted 
cooper’s club hammer which he had 
snatched from a cask near by.

“Heated and irritated as he was by his 
spasmodic toil at the pumps, for all 
his first nameless feeling of 
forbearance the sweating Steelkilt 
could but ill brook this bearing in the 
mate; but somehow still smothering the 
conflagration within him, without 
speaking he remained doggedly rooted to 
his seat, till at last the incensed 
Radney shook the hammer within a few 
inches of his face, furiously 
commanding him to do his bidding.

“Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating 
round the windlass, steadily followed 
by the mate with his menacing hammer, 
deliberately repeated his intention not 
to obey. Seeing, however, that his 
forbearance had not the slightest 
effect, by an awful and unspeakable 
intimation with his twisted hand he 
warned off the foolish and infatuated 
man; but it was to no purpose. And in 
this way the two went once slowly round 
the windlass; when, resolved at last no 
longer to retreat, bethinking him that 
he had now forborne as much as 
comported with his humor, the Lakeman 
paused on the hatches and thus spoke to 
the officer:

“‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take 
that hammer away, or look to yourself.’ 
But the predestinated mate coming still 
closer to him, where the Lakeman stood 
fixed, now shook the heavy hammer 
within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile 
repeating a string of insufferable 
maledictions. Retreating not the 
thousandth part of an inch; stabbing 
him in the eye with the unflinching 
poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, 
clenching his right hand behind him and 
creepingly drawing it back, told his 
persecutor that if the hammer but 
grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would 
murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool 
had been branded for the slaughter by 
the gods. Immediately the hammer 
touched the cheek; the next instant the 
lower jaw of the mate was stove in his 
head; he fell on the hatch spouting 
blood like a whale.

“Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was 
shaking one of the backstays leading 
far aloft to where two of his comrades 
were standing their mastheads. They 
were both Canallers.

“‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have 
seen many whale-ships in our harbours, 
but never heard of your Canallers. 
Pardon: who and what are they?’

“‘Canallers, Don, are the boatmen 
belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You 
must have heard of it.’

“‘Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, 
warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, 
we know but little of your vigorous 
North.’

“‘Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. 
Your chicha’s very fine; and ere 
proceeding further I will tell ye what 
our Canallers are; for such information 
may throw side-light upon my story.’

“For three hundred and sixty miles, 
gentlemen, through the entire breadth 
of the state of New York; through 
numerous populous cities and most 
thriving villages; through long, 
dismal, uninhabited swamps, and 
affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled 
for fertility; by billiard-room and 
bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of 
great forests; on Roman arches over 
Indian rivers; through sun and shade; 
by happy hearts or broken; through all 
the wide contrasting scenery of those 
noble Mohawk counties; and especially, 
by rows of snow-white chapels, whose 
spires stand almost like milestones, 
flows one continual stream of 
Venetianly corrupt and often lawless 
life. There’s your true Ashantee, 
gentlemen; there howl your pagans; 
where you ever find them, next door to 
you; under the long-flung shadow, and 
the snug patronising lee of churches. 
For by some curious fatality, as it is 
often noted of your metropolitan 
freebooters that they ever encamp 
around the halls of justice, so 
sinners, gentlemen, most abound in 
holiest vicinities.

“‘Is that a friar passing?’ said Don 
Pedro, looking downwards into the 
crowded plazza, with humorous concern.

“‘Well for our northern friend, Dame 
Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in Lima,’ 
laughed Don Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’

“‘A moment! Pardon!’ cried another of 
the company. ‘In the name of all us 
Limeese, I but desire to express to 
you, sir sailor, that we have by no 
means overlooked your delicacy in not 
substituting present Lima for distant 
Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! 
do not bow and look surprised; you know 
the proverb all along this 
coast—“Corrupt as Lima.” It but bears 
out your saying, too; churches more 
plentiful than billiard-tables, and for 
ever open—and “Corrupt as Lima.” So, 
too, Venice; I have been there; the 
holy city of the blessed evangelist, 
St. Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it! Your 
cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you 
pour out again.’

“Freely depicted in his own vocation, 
gentlemen, the Canaller would make a 
fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and 
picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark 
Antony, for days and days along his 
green-turfed, flowery Nile, he 
indolently floats, openly toying with 
his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his 
apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But 
ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. 
The brigandish guise which the Canaller 
so proudly sports; his slouched and 
gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand 
features. A terror to the smiling 
innocence of the villages through which 
he floats; his swart visage and bold 
swagger are not unshunned in cities. 
Once a vagabond on his own canal, I 
have received good turns from one of 
these Canallers; I thank him heartily; 
would fain be not ungrateful; but it is 
often one of the prime redeeming 
qualities of your man of violence, that 
at times he has as stiff an arm to back 
a poor stranger in a strait, as to 
plunder a wealthy one. In sum, 
gentlemen, what the wildness of this 
canal life is, is emphatically evinced 
by this; that our wild whale-fishery 
contains so many of its most finished 
graduates, and that scarce any race of 
mankind, except Sydney men, are so much 
distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor 
does it at all diminish the curiousness 
of this matter, that to many thousands 
of our rural boys and young men born 
along its line, the probationary life 
of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole 
transition between quietly reaping in a 
Christian corn-field, and recklessly 
ploughing the waters of the most 
barbaric seas.

“‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed 
Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon his 
silvery ruffles. ‘No need to travel! 
The world’s one Lima. I had thought, 
now, that at your temperate North the 
generations were cold and holy as the 
hills.—But the story.’

“I left off, gentlemen, where the 
Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly had 
he done so, when he was surrounded by 
the three junior mates and the four 
harpooneers, who all crowded him to the 
deck. But sliding down the ropes like 
baleful comets, the two Canallers 
rushed into the uproar, and sought to 
drag their man out of it towards the 
forecastle. Others of the sailors 
joined with them in this attempt, and a 
twisted turmoil ensued; while standing 
out of harm’s way, the valiant captain 
danced up and down with a whale-pike, 
calling upon his officers to manhandle 
that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him 
along to the quarter-deck. At 
intervals, he ran close up to the 
revolving border of the confusion, and 
prying into the heart of it with his 
pike, sought to prick out the object of 
his resentment. But Steelkilt and his 
desperadoes were too much for them all; 
they succeeded in gaining the 
forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing 
about three or four large casks in a 
line with the windlass, these 
sea-Parisians entrenched themselves 
behind the barricade.

“‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared 
the captain, now menacing them with a 
pistol in each hand, just brought to 
him by the steward. ‘Come out of that, 
ye cut-throats!’

“Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and 
striding up and down there, defied the 
worst the pistols could do; but gave 
the captain to understand distinctly, 
that his (Steelkilt’s) death would be 
the signal for a murderous mutiny on 
the part of all hands. Fearing in his 
heart lest this might prove but too 
true, the captain a little desisted, 
but still commanded the insurgents 
instantly to return to their duty.

“‘Will you promise not to touch us, if 
we do?’ demanded their ringleader.

“‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no 
promise;—to your duty! Do you want to 
sink the ship, by knocking off at a 
time like this? Turn to!’ and he once 
more raised a pistol.

“‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. 
‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us 
turns to, unless you swear not to raise 
a rope-yarn against us. What say ye, 
men?’ turning to his comrades. A fierce 
cheer was their response.

“The Lakeman now patrolled the 
barricade, all the while keeping his 
eye on the Captain, and jerking out 
such sentences as these:—‘It’s not our 
fault; we didn’t want it; I told him to 
take his hammer away; it was boy’s 
business; he might have known me before 
this; I told him not to prick the 
buffalo; I believe I have broken a 
finger here against his cursed jaw; 
ain’t those mincing knives down in the 
forecastle there, men? look to those 
handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by 
God, look to yourself; say the word; 
don’t be a fool; forget it all; we are 
ready to turn to; treat us decently, 
and we’re your men; but we won’t be 
flogged.’

“‘Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, 
I say!’

“‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, 
flinging out his arm towards him, 
‘there are a few of us here (and I am 
one of them) who have shipped for the 
cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, 
sir, we can claim our discharge as soon 
as the anchor is down; so we don’t want 
a row; it’s not our interest; we want 
to be peaceable; we are ready to work, 
but we won’t be flogged.’

“‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain.

“Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, 
and then said:—‘I tell you what it is 
now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and 
be hung for such a shabby rascal, we 
won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye 
attack us; but till you say the word 
about not flogging us, we don’t do a 
hand’s turn.’

“‘Down into the forecastle then, down 
with ye, I’ll keep ye there till ye’re 
sick of it. Down ye go.’

“‘Shall we?’ cried the ringleader to 
his men. Most of them were against it; 
but at length, in obedience to 
Steelkilt, they preceded him down into 
their dark den, growlingly 
disappearing, like bears into a cave.

“As the Lakeman’s bare head was just 
level with the planks, the Captain and 
his posse leaped the barricade, and 
rapidly drawing over the slide of the 
scuttle, planted their group of hands 
upon it, and loudly called for the 
steward to bring the heavy brass 
padlock belonging to the companionway.

“Then opening the slide a little, the 
Captain whispered something down the 
crack, closed it, and turned the key 
upon them—ten in number—leaving on deck 
some twenty or more, who thus far had 
remained neutral.

“All night a wide-awake watch was kept 
by all the officers, forward and aft, 
especially about the forecastle scuttle 
and fore hatchway; at which last place 
it was feared the insurgents might 
emerge, after breaking through the 
bulkhead below. But the hours of 
darkness passed in peace; the men who 
still remained at their duty toiling 
hard at the pumps, whose clinking and 
clanking at intervals through the 
dreary night dismally resounded through 
the ship.

“At sunrise the Captain went forward, 
and knocking on the deck, summoned the 
prisoners to work; but with a yell they 
refused. Water was then lowered down to 
them, and a couple of handfuls of 
biscuit were tossed after it; when 
again turning the key upon them and 
pocketing it, the Captain returned to 
the quarter-deck. Twice every day for 
three days this was repeated; but on 
the fourth morning a confused 
wrangling, and then a scuffling was 
heard, as the customary summons was 
delivered; and suddenly four men burst 
up from the forecastle, saying they 
were ready to turn to. The fetid 
closeness of the air, and a famishing 
diet, united perhaps to some fears of 
ultimate retribution, had constrained 
them to surrender at discretion. 
Emboldened by this, the Captain 
reiterated his demand to the rest, but 
Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific 
hint to stop his babbling and betake 
himself where he belonged. On the fifth 
morning three others of the mutineers 
bolted up into the air from the 
desperate arms below that sought to 
restrain them. Only three were left.

“‘Better turn to, now?’ said the 
Captain with a heartless jeer.

“‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried 
Steelkilt.

“‘Oh certainly,’ said the Captain, and 
the key clicked.

“It was at this point, gentlemen, that 
enraged by the defection of seven of 
his former associates, and stung by the 
mocking voice that had last hailed him, 
and maddened by his long entombment in 
a place as black as the bowels of 
despair; it was then that Steelkilt 
proposed to the two Canallers, thus far 
apparently of one mind with him, to 
burst out of their hole at the next 
summoning of the garrison; and armed 
with their keen mincing knives (long, 
crescentic, heavy implements with a 
handle at each end) run amuck from the 
bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any 
devilishness of desperation possible, 
seize the ship. For himself, he would 
do this, he said, whether they joined 
him or not. That was the last night he 
should spend in that den. But the 
scheme met with no opposition on the 
part of the other two; they swore they 
were ready for that, or for any other 
mad thing, for anything in short but a 
surrender. And what was more, they each 
insisted upon being the first man on 
deck, when the time to make the rush 
should come. But to this their leader 
as fiercely objected, reserving that 
priority for himself; particularly as 
his two comrades would not yield, the 
one to the other, in the matter; and 
both of them could not be first, for 
the ladder would but admit one man at a 
time. And here, gentlemen, the foul 
play of these miscreants must come out.

“Upon hearing the frantic project of 
their leader, each in his own separate 
soul had suddenly lighted, it would 
seem, upon the same piece of treachery, 
namely: to be foremost in breaking out, 
in order to be the first of the three, 
though the last of the ten, to 
surrender; and thereby secure whatever 
small chance of pardon such conduct 
might merit. But when Steelkilt made 
known his determination still to lead 
them to the last, they in some way, by 
some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed 
their before secret treacheries 
together; and when their leader fell 
into a doze, verbally opened their 
souls to each other in three sentences; 
and bound the sleeper with cords, and 
gagged him with cords; and shrieked out 
for the Captain at midnight.

“Thinking murder at hand, and smelling 
in the dark for the blood, he and all 
his armed mates and harpooneers rushed 
for the forecastle. In a few minutes 
the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand 
and foot, the still struggling 
ringleader was shoved up into the air 
by his perfidious allies, who at once 
claimed the honour of securing a man 
who had been fully ripe for murder. But 
all these were collared, and dragged 
along the deck like dead cattle; and, 
side by side, were seized up into the 
mizzen rigging, like three quarters of 
meat, and there they hung till morning. 
‘Damn ye,’ cried the Captain, pacing to 
and fro before them, ‘the vultures 
would not touch ye, ye villains!’

“At sunrise he summoned all hands; and 
separating those who had rebelled from 
those who had taken no part in the 
mutiny, he told the former that he had 
a good mind to flog them all 
round—thought, upon the whole, he would 
do so—he ought to—justice demanded it; 
but for the present, considering their 
timely surrender, he would let them go 
with a reprimand, which he accordingly 
administered in the vernacular.

“‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues,’ 
turning to the three men in the 
rigging—‘for you, I mean to mince ye up 
for the try-pots;’ and, seizing a rope, 
he applied it with all his might to the 
backs of the two traitors, till they 
yelled no more, but lifelessly hung 
their heads sideways, as the two 
crucified thieves are drawn.

“‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he 
cried, at last; ‘but there is still 
rope enough left for you, my fine 
bantam, that wouldn’t give up. Take 
that gag from his mouth, and let us 
hear what he can say for himself.’

“For a moment the exhausted mutineer 
made a tremulous motion of his cramped 
jaws, and then painfully twisting round 
his head, said in a sort of hiss, ‘What 
I say is this—and mind it well—if you 
flog me, I murder you!’

“‘Say ye so? then see how ye frighten 
me’—and the Captain drew off with the 
rope to strike.

“‘Best not,’ hissed the Lakeman.

“‘But I must,’—and the rope was once 
more drawn back for the stroke.

“Steelkilt here hissed out something, 
inaudible to all but the Captain; who, 
to the amazement of all hands, started 
back, paced the deck rapidly two or 
three times, and then suddenly throwing 
down his rope, said, ‘I won’t do it—let 
him go—cut him down: d’ye hear?’

“But as the junior mates were hurrying 
to execute the order, a pale man, with 
a bandaged head, arrested them—Radney 
the chief mate. Ever since the blow, he 
had lain in his berth; but that 
morning, hearing the tumult on the 
deck, he had crept out, and thus far 
had watched the whole scene. Such was 
the state of his mouth, that he could 
hardly speak; but mumbling something 
about his being willing and able to do 
what the captain dared not attempt, he 
snatched the rope and advanced to his 
pinioned foe.

“‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman.

“‘So I am, but take that.’ The mate was 
in the very act of striking, when 
another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. 
He paused: and then pausing no more, 
made good his word, spite of 
Steelkilt’s threat, whatever that might 
have been. The three men were then cut 
down, all hands were turned to, and, 
sullenly worked by the moody seamen, 
the iron pumps clanged as before.

“Just after dark that day, when one 
watch had retired below, a clamor was 
heard in the forecastle; and the two 
trembling traitors running up, besieged 
the cabin door, saying they durst not 
consort with the crew. Entreaties, 
cuffs, and kicks could not drive them 
back, so at their own instance they 
were put down in the ship’s run for 
salvation. Still, no sign of mutiny 
reappeared among the rest. On the 
contrary, it seemed, that mainly at 
Steelkilt’s instigation, they had 
resolved to maintain the strictest 
peacefulness, obey all orders to the 
last, and, when the ship reached port, 
desert her in a body. But in order to 
insure the speediest end to the voyage, 
they all agreed to another 
thing—namely, not to sing out for 
whales, in case any should be 
discovered. For, spite of her leak, and 
spite of all her other perils, the 
Town-Ho still maintained her 
mast-heads, and her captain was just as 
willing to lower for a fish that 
moment, as on the day his craft first 
struck the cruising ground; and Radney 
the mate was quite as ready to change 
his berth for a boat, and with his 
bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the 
vital jaw of the whale.

“But though the Lakeman had induced the 
seamen to adopt this sort of 
passiveness in their conduct, he kept 
his own counsel (at least till all was 
over) concerning his own proper and 
private revenge upon the man who had 
stung him in the ventricles of his 
heart. He was in Radney the chief 
mate’s watch; and as if the infatuated 
man sought to run more than half way to 
meet his doom, after the scene at the 
rigging, he insisted, against the 
express counsel of the captain, upon 
resuming the head of his watch at 
night. Upon this, and one or two other 
circumstances, Steelkilt systematically 
built the plan of his revenge.

“During the night, Radney had an 
unseamanlike way of sitting on the 
bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and 
leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the 
boat which was hoisted up there, a 
little above the ship’s side. In this 
attitude, it was well known, he 
sometimes dozed. There was a 
considerable vacancy between the boat 
and the ship, and down between this was 
the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, 
and found that his next trick at the 
helm would come round at two o’clock, 
in the morning of the third day from 
that in which he had been betrayed. At 
his leisure, he employed the interval 
in braiding something very carefully in 
his watches below.

“‘What are you making there?’ said a 
shipmate.

“‘What do you think? what does it look 
like?’

“‘Like a lanyard for your bag; but it’s 
an odd one, seems to me.’

“‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the 
Lakeman, holding it at arm’s length 
before him; ‘but I think it will 
answer. Shipmate, I haven’t enough 
twine,—have you any?’

“But there was none in the forecastle.

“‘Then I must get some from old Rad;’ 
and he rose to go aft.

“‘You don’t mean to go a begging to 
him!’ said a sailor.

“‘Why not? Do you think he won’t do me 
a turn, when it’s to help himself in 
the end, shipmate?’ and going to the 
mate, he looked at him quietly, and 
asked him for some twine to mend his 
hammock. It was given him—neither twine 
nor lanyard were seen again; but the 
next night an iron ball, closely 
netted, partly rolled from the pocket 
of the Lakeman’s monkey jacket, as he 
was tucking the coat into his hammock 
for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, 
his trick at the silent helm—nigh to 
the man who was apt to doze over the 
grave always ready dug to the seaman’s 
hand—that fatal hour was then to come; 
and in the fore-ordaining soul of 
Steelkilt, the mate was already stark 
and stretched as a corpse, with his 
forehead crushed in.

“But, gentlemen, a fool saved the 
would-be murderer from the bloody deed 
he had planned. Yet complete revenge he 
had, and without being the avenger. For 
by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself 
seemed to step in to take out of his 
hands into its own the damning thing he 
would have done.

“It was just between daybreak and 
sunrise of the morning of the second 
day, when they were washing down the 
decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, 
drawing water in the main-chains, all 
at once shouted out, ‘There she rolls! 
there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! 
It was Moby Dick.

“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. 
Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have 
christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’

“‘A very white, and famous, and most 
deadly immortal monster, Don;—but that 
would be too long a story.’

“‘How? how?’ cried all the young 
Spaniards, crowding.

“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot 
rehearse that now. Let me get more into 
the air, Sirs.’

“‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don 
Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend looks 
faint;—fill up his empty glass!’

“No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I 
proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so suddenly 
perceiving the snowy whale within fifty 
yards of the ship—forgetful of the 
compact among the crew—in the 
excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe 
man had instinctively and involuntarily 
lifted his voice for the monster, 
though for some little time past it had 
been plainly beheld from the three 
sullen mast-heads. All was now a 
phrensy. ‘The White Whale—the White 
Whale!’ was the cry from captain, 
mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred 
by fearful rumours, were all anxious to 
capture so famous and precious a fish; 
while the dogged crew eyed askance, and 
with curses, the appalling beauty of 
the vast milky mass, that lit up by a 
horizontal spangling sun, shifted and 
glistened like a living opal in the 
blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange 
fatality pervades the whole career of 
these events, as if verily mapped out 
before the world itself was charted. 
The mutineer was the bowsman of the 
mate, and when fast to a fish, it was 
his duty to sit next him, while Radney 
stood up with his lance in the prow, 
and haul in or slacken the line, at the 
word of command. Moreover, when the 
four boats were lowered, the mate’s got 
the start; and none howled more 
fiercely with delight than did 
Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. 
After a stiff pull, their harpooneer 
got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney 
sprang to the bow. He was always a 
furious man, it seems, in a boat. And 
now his bandaged cry was, to beach him 
on the whale’s topmost back. Nothing 
loath, his bowsman hauled him up and 
up, through a blinding foam that blent 
two whitenesses together; till of a 
sudden the boat struck as against a 
sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled 
out the standing mate. That instant, as 
he fell on the whale’s slippery back, 
the boat righted, and was dashed aside 
by the swell, while Radney was tossed 
over into the sea, on the other flank 
of the whale. He struck out through the 
spray, and, for an instant, was dimly 
seen through that veil, wildly seeking 
to remove himself from the eye of Moby 
Dick. But the whale rushed round in a 
sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer 
between his jaws; and rearing high up 
with him, plunged headlong again, and 
went down.

“Meantime, at the first tap of the 
boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had 
slackened the line, so as to drop 
astern from the whirlpool; calmly 
looking on, he thought his own 
thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, 
downward jerking of the boat, quickly 
brought his knife to the line. He cut 
it; and the whale was free. But, at 
some distance, Moby Dick rose again, 
with some tatters of Radney’s red 
woollen shirt, caught in the teeth that 
had destroyed him. All four boats gave 
chase again; but the whale eluded them, 
and finally wholly disappeared.

“In good time, the Town-Ho reached her 
port—a savage, solitary place—where no 
civilized creature resided. There, 
headed by the Lakeman, all but five or 
six of the foremastmen deliberately 
deserted among the palms; eventually, 
as it turned out, seizing a large 
double war-canoe of the savages, and 
setting sail for some other harbor.

“The ship’s company being reduced to 
but a handful, the captain called upon 
the Islanders to assist him in the 
laborious business of heaving down the 
ship to stop the leak. But to such 
unresting vigilance over their 
dangerous allies was this small band of 
whites necessitated, both by night and 
by day, and so extreme was the hard 
work they underwent, that upon the 
vessel being ready again for sea, they 
were in such a weakened condition that 
the captain durst not put off with them 
in so heavy a vessel. After taking 
counsel with his officers, he anchored 
the ship as far off shore as possible; 
loaded and ran out his two cannon from 
the bows; stacked his muskets on the 
poop; and warning the Islanders not to 
approach the ship at their peril, took 
one man with him, and setting the sail 
of his best whale-boat, steered 
straight before the wind for Tahiti, 
five hundred miles distant, to procure 
a reinforcement to his crew.

“On the fourth day of the sail, a large 
canoe was descried, which seemed to 
have touched at a low isle of corals. 
He steered away from it; but the savage 
craft bore down on him; and soon the 
voice of Steelkilt hailed him to heave 
to, or he would run him under water. 
The captain presented a pistol. With 
one foot on each prow of the yoked 
war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to 
scorn; assuring him that if the pistol 
so much as clicked in the lock, he 
would bury him in bubbles and foam.

“‘What do you want of me?’ cried the 
captain.

“‘Where are you bound? and for what are 
you bound?’ demanded Steelkilt; ‘no 
lies.’

“‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’

“‘Very good. Let me board you a 
moment—I come in peace.’ With that he 
leaped from the canoe, swam to the 
boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood 
face to face with the captain.

“‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your 
head. Now, repeat after me. As soon as 
Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach 
this boat on yonder island, and remain 
there six days. If I do not, may 
lightning strike me!’

“‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the 
Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping 
into the sea, he swam back to his 
comrades.

“Watching the boat till it was fairly 
beached, and drawn up to the roots of 
the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made 
sail again, and in due time arrived at 
Tahiti, his own place of destination. 
There, luck befriended him; two ships 
were about to sail for France, and were 
providentially in want of precisely 
that number of men which the sailor 
headed. They embarked; and so for ever 
got the start of their former captain, 
had he been at all minded to work them 
legal retribution.

“Some ten days after the French ships 
sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and the 
captain was forced to enlist some of 
the more civilized Tahitians, who had 
been somewhat used to the sea. 
Chartering a small native schooner, he 
returned with them to his vessel; and 
finding all right there, again resumed 
his cruisings.

“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, 
none know; but upon the island of 
Nantucket, the widow of Radney still 
turns to the sea which refuses to give 
up its dead; still in dreams sees the 
awful white whale that destroyed him.

“‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, 
quietly.

“‘I am, Don.’

“‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the 
best of your own convictions, this your 
story is in substance really true? It 
is so passing wonderful! Did you get it 
from an unquestionable source? Bear 
with me if I seem to press.’

“‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; 
for we all join in Don Sebastian’s 
suit,’ cried the company, with 
exceeding interest.

“‘Is there a copy of the Holy 
Evangelists in the Golden Inn, 
gentlemen?’

“‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know 
a worthy priest near by, who will 
quickly procure one for me. I go for 
it; but are you well advised? this may 
grow too serious.’

“‘Will you be so good as to bring the 
priest also, Don?’

“‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fe’s in 
Lima now,’ said one of the company to 
another; ‘I fear our sailor friend runs 
risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us 
withdraw more out of the moonlight. I 
see no need of this.’

“‘Excuse me for running after you, Don 
Sebastian; but may I also beg that you 
will be particular in procuring the 
largest sized Evangelists you can.’

“‘This is the priest, he brings you the 
Evangelists,’ said Don Sebastian, 
gravely, returning with a tall and 
solemn figure.

“‘Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable 
priest, further into the light, and 
hold the Holy Book before me that I may 
touch it.

“‘So help me Heaven, and on my honour 
the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is 
in substance and its great items, true. 
I know it to be true; it happened on 
this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the 
crew; I have seen and talked with 
Steelkilt since the death of Radney.’” 

 

CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures 
of Whales.

I shall ere long paint to you as well 
as one can without canvas, something 
like the true form of the whale as he 
actually appears to the eye of the 
whaleman when in his own absolute body 
the whale is moored alongside the 
whale-ship so that he can be fairly 
stepped upon there. It may be worth 
while, therefore, previously to advert 
to those curious imaginary portraits of 
him which even down to the present day 
confidently challenge the faith of the 
landsman. It is time to set the world 
right in this matter, by proving such 
pictures of the whale all wrong.

It may be that the primal source of all 
those pictorial delusions will be found 
among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and 
Grecian sculptures. For ever since 
those inventive but unscrupulous times 
when on the marble panellings of 
temples, the pedestals of statues, and 
on shields, medallions, cups, and 
coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales 
of chain-armor like Saladin’s, and a 
helmeted head like St. George’s; ever 
since then has something of the same 
sort of license prevailed, not only in 
most popular pictures of the whale, but 
in many scientific presentations of him.

Now, by all odds, the most ancient 
extant portrait anyways purporting to 
be the whale’s, is to be found in the 
famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in 
India. The Brahmins maintain that in 
the almost endless sculptures of that 
immemorial pagoda, all the trades and 
pursuits, every conceivable avocation 
of man, were prefigured ages before any 
of them actually came into being. No 
wonder then, that in some sort our 
noble profession of whaling should have 
been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo 
whale referred to, occurs in a separate 
department of the wall, depicting the 
incarnation of Vishnu in the form of 
leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse 
Avatar. But though this sculpture is 
half man and half whale, so as only to 
give the tail of the latter, yet that 
small section of him is all wrong. It 
looks more like the tapering tail of an 
anaconda, than the broad palms of the 
true whale’s majestic flukes.

But go to the old Galleries, and look 
now at a great Christian painter’s 
portrait of this fish; for he succeeds 
no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. 
It is Guido’s picture of Perseus 
rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster 
or whale. Where did Guido get the model 
of such a strange creature as that? Nor 
does Hogarth, in painting the same 
scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” 
make out one whit better. The huge 
corpulence of that Hogarthian monster 
undulates on the surface, scarcely 
drawing one inch of water. It has a 
sort of howdah on its back, and its 
distended tusked mouth into which the 
billows are rolling, might be taken for 
the Traitors’ Gate leading from the 
Thames by water into the Tower. Then, 
there are the Prodromus whales of old 
Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale, as 
depicted in the prints of old Bibles 
and the cuts of old primers. What shall 
be said of these? As for the 
book-binder’s whale winding like a 
vine-stalk round the stock of a 
descending anchor—as stamped and gilded 
on the backs and title-pages of many 
books both old and new—that is a very 
picturesque but purely fabulous 
creature, imitated, I take it, from the 
like figures on antique vases. Though 
universally denominated a dolphin, I 
nevertheless call this book-binder’s 
fish an attempt at a whale; because it 
was so intended when the device was 
first introduced. It was introduced by 
an old Italian publisher somewhere 
about the 15th century, during the 
Revival of Learning; and in those days, 
and even down to a comparatively late 
period, dolphins were popularly 
supposed to be a species of the 
Leviathan.

In the vignettes and other 
embellishments of some ancient books 
you will at times meet with very 
curious touches at the whale, where all 
manner of spouts, jets d’eau, hot 
springs and cold, Saratoga and 
Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his 
unexhausted brain. In the title-page of 
the original edition of the 
“Advancement of Learning” you will find 
some curious whales.

But quitting all these unprofessional 
attempts, let us glance at those 
pictures of leviathan purporting to be 
sober, scientific delineations, by 
those who know. In old Harris’s 
collection of voyages there are some 
plates of whales extracted from a Dutch 
book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled “A 
Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the 
ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson 
of Friesland, master.” In one of those 
plates the whales, like great rafts of 
logs, are represented lying among 
ice-isles, with white bears running 
over their living backs. In another 
plate, the prodigious blunder is made 
of representing the whale with 
perpendicular flukes.

Then again, there is an imposing 
quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, 
a Post Captain in the English navy, 
entitled “A Voyage round Cape Horn into 
the South Seas, for the purpose of 
extending the Spermaceti Whale 
Fisheries.” In this book is an outline 
purporting to be a “Picture of a 
Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by 
scale from one killed on the coast of 
Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on 
deck.” I doubt not the captain had this 
veracious picture taken for the benefit 
of his marines. To mention but one 
thing about it, let me say that it has 
an eye which applied, according to the 
accompanying scale, to a full grown 
sperm whale, would make the eye of that 
whale a bow-window some five feet long. 
Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not 
give us Jonah looking out of that eye!

Nor are the most conscientious 
compilations of Natural History for the 
benefit of the young and tender, free 
from the same heinousness of mistake. 
Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s 
Animated Nature.” In the abridged 
London edition of 1807, there are 
plates of an alleged “whale” and a 
“narwhale.” I do not wish to seem 
inelegant, but this unsightly whale 
looks much like an amputated sow; and, 
as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it 
is enough to amaze one, that in this 
nineteenth century such a hippogriff 
could be palmed for genuine upon any 
intelligent public of schoolboys.

Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, 
Count de Lacepede, a great naturalist, 
published a scientific systemized whale 
book, wherein are several pictures of 
the different species of the Leviathan. 
All these are not only incorrect, but 
the picture of the Mysticetus or 
Greenland whale (that is to say, the 
Right whale), even Scoresby, a long 
experienced man as touching that 
species, declares not to have its 
counterpart in nature.

But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all 
this blundering business was reserved 
for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, 
brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, 
he published a Natural History of 
Whales, in which he gives what he calls 
a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before 
showing that picture to any 
Nantucketer, you had best provide for 
your summary retreat from Nantucket. In 
a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale 
is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of 
course, he never had the benefit of a 
whaling voyage (such men seldom have), 
but whence he derived that picture, who 
can tell? Perhaps he got it as his 
scientific predecessor in the same 
field, Desmarest, got one of his 
authentic abortions; that is, from a 
Chinese drawing. And what sort of 
lively lads with the pencil those 
Chinese are, many queer cups and 
saucers inform us.

As for the sign-painters’ whales seen 
in the streets hanging over the shops 
of oil-dealers, what shall be said of 
them? They are generally Richard III. 
whales, with dromedary humps, and very 
savage; breakfasting on three or four 
sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full 
of mariners: their deformities 
floundering in seas of blood and blue 
paint.

But these manifold mistakes in 
depicting the whale are not so very 
surprising after all. Consider! Most of 
the scientific drawings have been taken 
from the stranded fish; and these are 
about as correct as a drawing of a 
wrecked ship, with broken back, would 
correctly represent the noble animal 
itself in all its undashed pride of 
hull and spars. Though elephants have 
stood for their full-lengths, the 
living Leviathan has never yet fairly 
floated himself for his portrait. The 
living whale, in his full majesty and 
significance, is only to be seen at sea 
in unfathomable waters; and afloat the 
vast bulk of him is out of sight, like 
a launched line-of-battle ship; and out 
of that element it is a thing eternally 
impossible for mortal man to hoist him 
bodily into the air, so as to preserve 
all his mighty swells and undulations. 
And, not to speak of the highly 
presumable difference of contour 
between a young sucking whale and a 
full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, 
even in the case of one of those young 
sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s 
deck, such is then the outlandish, 
eel-like, limbered, varying shape of 
him, that his precise expression the 
devil himself could not catch.

But it may be fancied, that from the 
naked skeleton of the stranded whale, 
accurate hints may be derived touching 
his true form. Not at all. For it is 
one of the more curious things about 
this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives 
very little idea of his general shape. 
Though Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, which 
hangs for candelabra in the library of 
one of his executors, correctly conveys 
the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian 
old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other 
leading personal characteristics; yet 
nothing of this kind could be inferred 
from any leviathan’s articulated bones. 
In fact, as the great Hunter says, the 
mere skeleton of the whale bears the 
same relation to the fully invested and 
padded animal as the insect does to the 
chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes 
it. This peculiarity is strikingly 
evinced in the head, as in some part of 
this book will be incidentally shown. 
It is also very curiously displayed in 
the side fin, the bones of which almost 
exactly answer to the bones of the 
human hand, minus only the thumb. This 
fin has four regular bone-fingers, the 
index, middle, ring, and little finger. 
But all these are permanently lodged in 
their fleshy covering, as the human 
fingers in an artificial covering. 
“However recklessly the whale may 
sometimes serve us,” said humorous 
Stubb one day, “he can never be truly 
said to handle us without mittens.”

For all these reasons, then, any way 
you may look at it, you must needs 
conclude that the great Leviathan is 
that one creature in the world which 
must remain unpainted to the last. 
True, one portrait may hit the mark 
much nearer than another, but none can 
hit it with any very considerable 
degree of exactness. So there is no 
earthly way of finding out precisely 
what the whale really looks like. And 
the only mode in which you can derive 
even a tolerable idea of his living 
contour, is by going a whaling 
yourself; but by so doing, you run no 
small risk of being eternally stove and 
sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me 
you had best not be too fastidious in 
your curiosity touching this Leviathan. 

 

CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous 
Pictures of Whales, and the True 
Pictures of Whaling Scenes.

In connexion with the monstrous 
pictures of whales, I am strongly 
tempted here to enter upon those still 
more monstrous stories of them which 
are to be found in certain books, both 
ancient and modern, especially in 
Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, 
Cuvier, etc. But I pass that matter by.

I know of only four published outlines 
of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett’s, 
Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and 
Beale’s. In the previous chapter 
Colnett and Cuvier have been referred 
to. Huggins’s is far better than 
theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is 
the best. All Beale’s drawings of this 
whale are good, excepting the middle 
figure in the picture of three whales 
in various attitudes, capping his 
second chapter. His frontispiece, boats 
attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt 
calculated to excite the civil 
scepticism of some parlor men, is 
admirably correct and life-like in its 
general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale 
drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty 
correct in contour; but they are 
wretchedly engraved. That is not his 
fault though.

Of the Right Whale, the best outline 
pictures are in Scoresby; but they are 
drawn on too small a scale to convey a 
desirable impression. He has but one 
picture of whaling scenes, and this is 
a sad deficiency, because it is by such 
pictures only, when at all well done, 
that you can derive anything like a 
truthful idea of the living whale as 
seen by his living hunters.

But, taken for all in all, by far the 
finest, though in some details not the 
most correct, presentations of whales 
and whaling scenes to be anywhere 
found, are two large French engravings, 
well executed, and taken from paintings 
by one Garnery. Respectively, they 
represent attacks on the Sperm and 
Right Whale. In the first engraving a 
noble Sperm Whale is depicted in full 
majesty of might, just risen beneath 
the boat from the profundities of the 
ocean, and bearing high in the air upon 
his back the terrific wreck of the 
stoven planks. The prow of the boat is 
partially unbroken, and is drawn just 
balancing upon the monster’s spine; and 
standing in that prow, for that one 
single incomputable flash of time, you 
behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the 
incensed boiling spout of the whale, 
and in the act of leaping, as if from a 
precipice. The action of the whole 
thing is wonderfully good and true. The 
half-emptied line-tub floats on the 
whitened sea; the wooden poles of the 
spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; 
the heads of the swimming crew are 
scattered about the whale in 
contrasting expressions of affright; 
while in the black stormy distance the 
ship is bearing down upon the scene. 
Serious fault might be found with the 
anatomical details of this whale, but 
let that pass; since, for the life of 
me, I could not draw so good a one.

In the second engraving, the boat is in 
the act of drawing alongside the 
barnacled flank of a large running 
Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy 
bulk in the sea like some mossy 
rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. 
His jets are erect, full, and black 
like soot; so that from so abounding a 
smoke in the chimney, you would think 
there must be a brave supper cooking in 
the great bowels below. Sea fowls are 
pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, 
and other sea candies and maccaroni, 
which the Right Whale sometimes carries 
on his pestilent back. And all the 
while the thick-lipped leviathan is 
rushing through the deep, leaving tons 
of tumultuous white curds in his wake, 
and causing the slight boat to rock in 
the swells like a skiff caught nigh the 
paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. 
Thus, the foreground is all raging 
commotion; but behind, in admirable 
artistic contrast, is the glassy level 
of a sea becalmed, the drooping 
unstarched sails of the powerless ship, 
and the inert mass of a dead whale, a 
conquered fortress, with the flag of 
capture lazily hanging from the 
whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.

Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I 
know not. But my life for it he was 
either practically conversant with his 
subject, or else marvellously tutored 
by some experienced whaleman. The 
French are the lads for painting 
action. Go and gaze upon all the 
paintings of Europe, and where will you 
find such a gallery of living and 
breathing commotion on canvas, as in 
that triumphal hall at Versailles; 
where the beholder fights his way, 
pell-mell, through the consecutive 
great battles of France; where every 
sword seems a flash of the Northern 
Lights, and the successive armed kings 
and Emperors dash by, like a charge of 
crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy 
of a place in that gallery, are these 
sea battle-pieces of Garnery.

The natural aptitude of the French for 
seizing the picturesqueness of things 
seems to be peculiarly evinced in what 
paintings and engravings they have of 
their whaling scenes. With not one 
tenth of England’s experience in the 
fishery, and not the thousandth part of 
that of the Americans, they have 
nevertheless furnished both nations 
with the only finished sketches at all 
capable of conveying the real spirit of 
the whale hunt. For the most part, the 
English and American whale draughtsmen 
seem entirely content with presenting 
the mechanical outline of things, such 
as the vacant profile of the whale; 
which, so far as picturesqueness of 
effect is concerned, is about 
tantamount to sketching the profile of 
a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly 
renowned Right whaleman, after giving 
us a stiff full length of the Greenland 
whale, and three or four delicate 
miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, 
treats us to a series of classical 
engravings of boat hooks, chopping 
knives, and grapnels; and with the 
microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck 
submits to the inspection of a 
shivering world ninety-six fac-similes 
of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I 
mean no disparagement to the excellent 
voyager (I honour him for a veteran), 
but in so important a matter it was 
certainly an oversight not to have 
procured for every crystal a sworn 
affidavit taken before a Greenland 
Justice of the Peace.

In addition to those fine engravings 
from Garnery, there are two other 
French engravings worthy of note, by 
some one who subscribes himself “H. 
Durand.” One of them, though not 
precisely adapted to our present 
purpose, nevertheless deserves mention 
on other accounts. It is a quiet 
noon-scene among the isles of the 
Pacific; a French whaler anchored, 
inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking 
water on board; the loosened sails of 
the ship, and the long leaves of the 
palms in the background, both drooping 
together in the breezeless air. The 
effect is very fine, when considered 
with reference to its presenting the 
hardy fishermen under one of their few 
aspects of oriental repose. The other 
engraving is quite a different affair: 
the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and 
in the very heart of the Leviathanic 
life, with a Right Whale alongside; the 
vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove 
over to the monster as if to a quay; 
and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from 
this scene of activity, is about giving 
chase to whales in the distance. The 
harpoons and lances lie levelled for 
use; three oarsmen are just setting the 
mast in its hole; while from a sudden 
roll of the sea, the little craft 
stands half-erect out of the water, 
like a rearing horse. From the ship, 
the smoke of the torments of the 
boiling whale is going up like the 
smoke over a village of smithies; and 
to windward, a black cloud, rising up 
with earnest of squalls and rains, 
seems to quicken the activity of the 
excited seamen. 

 

CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in 
Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in 
Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.

On Tower-hill, as you go down to the 
London docks, you may have seen a 
crippled beggar (or kedger, as the 
sailors say) holding a painted board 
before him, representing the tragic 
scene in which he lost his leg. There 
are three whales and three boats; and 
one of the boats (presumed to contain 
the missing leg in all its original 
integrity) is being crunched by the 
jaws of the foremost whale. Any time 
these ten years, they tell me, has that 
man held up that picture, and exhibited 
that stump to an incredulous world. But 
the time of his justification has now 
come. His three whales are as good 
whales as were ever published in 
Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as 
unquestionable a stump as any you will 
find in the western clearings. But, 
though for ever mounted on that stump, 
never a stump-speech does the poor 
whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, 
stands ruefully contemplating his own 
amputation.

Throughout the Pacific, and also in 
Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag 
Harbor, you will come across lively 
sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, 
graven by the fishermen themselves on 
Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks 
wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, 
and other like skrimshander articles, 
as the whalemen call the numerous 
little ingenious contrivances they 
elaborately carve out of the rough 
material, in their hours of ocean 
leisure. Some of them have little boxes 
of dentistical-looking implements, 
specially intended for the 
skrimshandering business. But, in 
general, they toil with their 
jack-knives alone; and, with that 
almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, 
they will turn you out anything you 
please, in the way of a mariner’s fancy.

Long exile from Christendom and 
civilization inevitably restores a man 
to that condition in which God placed 
him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your 
true whale-hunter is as much a savage 
as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, 
owning no allegiance but to the King of 
the Cannibals; and ready at any moment 
to rebel against him.

Now, one of the peculiar 
characteristics of the savage in his 
domestic hours, is his wonderful 
patience of industry. An ancient 
Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in 
its full multiplicity and elaboration 
of carving, is as great a trophy of 
human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. 
For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell 
or a shark’s tooth, that miraculous 
intricacy of wooden net-work has been 
achieved; and it has cost steady years 
of steady application.

As with the Hawaiian savage, so with 
the white sailor-savage. With the same 
marvellous patience, and with the same 
single shark’s tooth, of his one poor 
jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of 
bone sculpture, not quite as 
workmanlike, but as close packed in its 
maziness of design, as the Greek 
savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of 
barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as 
the prints of that fine old Dutch 
savage, Albert Durer.

Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile 
out of the small dark slabs of the 
noble South Sea war-wood, are 
frequently met with in the forecastles 
of American whalers. Some of them are 
done with much accuracy.

At some old gable-roofed country houses 
you will see brass whales hung by the 
tail for knockers to the road-side 
door. When the porter is sleepy, the 
anvil-headed whale would be best. But 
these knocking whales are seldom 
remarkable as faithful essays. On the 
spires of some old-fashioned churches 
you will see sheet-iron whales placed 
there for weather-cocks; but they are 
so elevated, and besides that are to 
all intents and purposes so labelled 
with “Hands off!” you cannot examine 
them closely enough to decide upon 
their merit.

In bony, ribby regions of the earth, 
where at the base of high broken cliffs 
masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic 
groupings upon the plain, you will 
often discover images as of the 
petrified forms of the Leviathan partly 
merged in grass, which of a windy day 
breaks against them in a surf of green 
surges.

Then, again, in mountainous countries 
where the traveller is continually 
girdled by amphitheatrical heights; 
here and there from some lucky point of 
view you will catch passing glimpses of 
the profiles of whales defined along 
the undulating ridges. But you must be 
a thorough whaleman, to see these 
sights; and not only that, but if you 
wish to return to such a sight again, 
you must be sure and take the exact 
intersecting latitude and longitude of 
your first stand-point, else so 
chance-like are such observations of 
the hills, that your precise, previous 
stand-point would require a laborious 
re-discovery; like the Soloma Islands, 
which still remain incognita, though 
once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and 
old Figuera chronicled them.

Nor when expandingly lifted by your 
subject, can you fail to trace out 
great whales in the starry heavens, and 
boats in pursuit of them; as when long 
filled with thoughts of war the Eastern 
nations saw armies locked in battle 
among the clouds. Thus at the North 
have I chased Leviathan round and round 
the Pole with the revolutions of the 
bright points that first defined him to 
me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic 
skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, 
and joined the chase against the starry 
Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of 
Hydrus and the Flying Fish.

With a frigate’s anchors for my 
bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for 
spurs, would I could mount that whale 
and leap the topmost skies, to see 
whether the fabled heavens with all 
their countless tents really lie 
encamped beyond my mortal sight! 

 

CHAPTER 58. Brit.

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

On the second day, numbers of Right 
Whales were seen, who, secure from the 
attack of a Sperm Whaler like the 
Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam 
through the brit, which, adhering to 
the fringing fibres of that wondrous 
Venetian blind in their mouths, was in 
that manner separated from the water 
that escaped at the lip.

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

*That part of the sea known among 
whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does not 
bear that name as the Banks of 
Newfoundland do, because of there being 
shallows and soundings there, but 
because of this remarkable meadow-like 
appearance, caused by the vast drifts 
of brit continually floating in those 
latitudes, where the Right Whale is 
often chased.

But it was only the sound they made as 
they parted the brit which at all 
reminded one of mowers. Seen from the 
mast-heads, especially when they paused 
and were stationary for a while, their 
vast black forms looked more like 
lifeless masses of rock than anything 
else. And as in the great hunting 
countries of India, the stranger at a 
distance will sometimes pass on the 
plains recumbent elephants without 
knowing them to be such, taking them 
for bare, blackened elevations of the 
soil; even so, often, with him, who for 
the first time beholds this species of 
the leviathans of the sea. And even 
when recognised at last, their immense 
magnitude renders it very hard really 
to believe that such bulky masses of 
overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in 
all parts, with the same sort of life 
that lives in a dog or a horse.

Indeed, in other respects, you can 
hardly regard any creatures of the deep 
with the same feelings that you do 
those of the shore. For though some old 
naturalists have maintained that all 
creatures of the land are of their kind 
in the sea; and though taking a broad 
general view of the thing, this may 
very well be; yet coming to 
specialties, where, for example, does 
the ocean furnish any fish that in 
disposition answers to the sagacious 
kindness of the dog? The accursed shark 
alone can in any generic respect be 
said to bear comparative analogy to him.

But though, to landsmen in general, the 
native inhabitants of the seas have 
ever been regarded with emotions 
unspeakably unsocial and repelling; 
though we know the sea to be an 
everlasting terra incognita, so that 
Columbus sailed over numberless unknown 
worlds to discover his one superficial 
western one; though, by vast odds, the 
most terrific of all mortal disasters 
have immemorially and indiscriminately 
befallen tens and hundreds of thousands 
of those who have gone upon the waters; 
though but a moment’s consideration 
will teach, that however baby man may 
brag of his science and skill, and 
however much, in a flattering future, 
that science and skill may augment; yet 
for ever and for ever, to the crack of 
doom, the sea will insult and murder 
him, and pulverize the stateliest, 
stiffest frigate he can make; 
nevertheless, by the continual 
repetition of these very impressions, 
man has lost that sense of the full 
awfulness of the sea which aboriginally 
belongs to it.

The first boat we read of, floated on 
an ocean, that with Portuguese 
vengeance had whelmed a whole world 
without leaving so much as a widow. 
That same ocean rolls now; that same 
ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of 
last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s 
flood is not yet subsided; two thirds 
of the fair world it yet covers.

Wherein differ the sea and the land, 
that a miracle upon one is not a 
miracle upon the other? Preternatural 
terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when 
under the feet of Korah and his company 
the live ground opened and swallowed 
them up for ever; yet not a modern sun 
ever sets, but in precisely the same 
manner the live sea swallows up ships 
and crews.

But not only is the sea such a foe to 
man who is an alien to it, but it is 
also a fiend to its own off-spring; 
worse than the Persian host who 
murdered his own guests; sparing not 
the creatures which itself hath 
spawned. Like a savage tigress that 
tossing in the jungle overlays her own 
cubs, so the sea dashes even the 
mightiest whales against the rocks, and 
leaves them there side by side with the 
split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no 
power but its own controls it. Panting 
and snorting like a mad battle steed 
that has lost its rider, the masterless 
ocean overruns the globe.

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how 
its most dreaded creatures glide under 
water, unapparent for the most part, 
and treacherously hidden beneath the 
loveliest tints of azure. Consider also 
the devilish brilliance and beauty of 
many of its most remorseless tribes, as 
the dainty embellished shape of many 
species of sharks. Consider, once more, 
the universal cannibalism of the sea; 
all whose creatures prey upon each 
other, carrying on eternal war since 
the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to 
this green, gentle, and most docile 
earth; consider them both, the sea and 
the land; and do you not find a strange 
analogy to something in yourself? For 
as this appalling ocean surrounds the 
verdant land, so in the soul of man 
there lies one insular Tahiti, full of 
peace and joy, but encompassed by all 
the horrors of the half known life. God 
keep thee! Push not off from that isle, 
thou canst never return! 

 

CHAPTER 59. Squid.

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

But one transparent blue morning, when 
a stillness almost preternatural spread 
over the sea, however unattended with 
any stagnant calm; when the long 
burnished sun-glade on the waters 
seemed a golden finger laid across 
them, enjoining some 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, a great white mass 
lazily rose, and rising higher and 
higher, and disentangling itself from 
the azure, at last gleamed before our 
prow like a snow-slide, new slid from 
the hills. Thus glistening for a 
moment, as slowly it subsided, and 
sank. Then once more arose, and 
silently gleamed. It seemed not a 
whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? 
thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went 
down, but on re-appearing once more, 
with a stiletto-like cry that startled 
every man from his nod, the negro 
yelled out—“There! there again! there 
she breaches! right ahead! The White 
Whale, the White Whale!”

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

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

The four boats were soon on the water; 
Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly 
pulling towards their prey. Soon it 
went down, and while, with oars 
suspended, we were awaiting its 
reappearance, lo! in the same spot 
where it sank, once more it slowly 
rose. Almost forgetting for the moment 
all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed 
at the most wondrous phenomenon which 
the secret seas have hitherto revealed 
to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs 
in length and breadth, of a glancing 
cream-colour, lay floating on the 
water, innumerable long arms radiating 
from its centre, and curling and 
twisting like a nest of anacondas, as 
if blindly to clutch at any hapless 
object within reach. No perceptible 
face or front did it have; no 
conceivable token of either sensation 
or instinct; but undulated there on the 
billows, an unearthly, formless, 
chance-like apparition of life.

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

“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.

“The great live squid, which, they say, 
few whale-ships ever beheld, and 
returned to their ports to tell of it.”

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

Whatever superstitions the sperm 
whalemen in general have connected with 
the sight of this object, certain it 
is, that a glimpse of it being so very 
unusual, that circumstance has gone far 
to invest it with portentousness. So 
rarely is it beheld, that though one 
and all of them declare it to be the 
largest animated thing in the ocean, 
yet very few of them have any but the 
most vague ideas concerning its true 
nature and form; notwithstanding, they 
believe it to furnish to the sperm 
whale his only food. For though other 
species of whales find their food above 
water, and may be seen by man in the 
act of feeding, the spermaceti whale 
obtains his whole food in unknown zones 
below the surface; and only by 
inference is it that any one can tell 
of what, precisely, that food consists. 
At times, when closely pursued, he will 
disgorge what are supposed to be the 
detached arms of the squid; some of 
them thus exhibited exceeding twenty 
and thirty feet in length. They fancy 
that the monster to which these arms 
belonged ordinarily clings by them to 
the bed of the ocean; and that the 
sperm whale, unlike other species, is 
supplied with teeth in order to attack 
and tear it.

There seems some ground to imagine that 
the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan 
may ultimately resolve itself into 
Squid. The manner in which the Bishop 
describes it, as alternately rising and 
sinking, with some other particulars he 
narrates, in all this the two 
correspond. But much abatement is 
necessary with respect to the 
incredible bulk he assigns it.

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

 

CHAPTER 60. The Line.

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

The line originally used in the fishery 
was of the best hemp, slightly 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; but 
Manilla is as a golden-haired 
Circassian to behold.

The whale-line is only two-thirds of an 
inch in thickness. At first sight, you 
would not think it so strong as it 
really is. By experiment its one and 
fifty yarns will each suspend a weight 
of one hundred and twenty pounds; so 
that the whole rope will bear a strain 
nearly equal to three tons. In length, 
the common sperm whale-line measures 
something over two hundred fathoms. 
Towards the stern of the boat it is 
spirally coiled away in the tub, not 
like the worm-pipe of a still though, 
but so as to form one round, 
cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded 
“sheaves,” or layers of concentric 
spiralizations, without any hollow but 
the “heart,” or minute vertical tube 
formed at the axis of the cheese. As 
the least tangle or kink in the coiling 
would, in running out, infallibly take 
somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body 
off, the utmost precaution is used in 
stowing the line in its tub. Some 
harpooneers will consume almost an 
entire morning in this business, 
carrying the line high aloft and then 
reeving it downwards through a block 
towards the tub, so as in the act of 
coiling to free it from all possible 
wrinkles and twists.

In the English boats two tubs are used 
instead of one; the same line being 
continuously coiled in both tubs. There 
is some advantage in this; because 
these twin-tubs being so small they fit 
more readily into the boat, and do not 
strain it so much; whereas, the 
American tub, nearly three feet in 
diameter and of proportionate depth, 
makes a rather bulky freight for a 
craft whose planks are but one 
half-inch in thickness; for the bottom 
of the whale-boat is like critical ice, 
which will bear up a considerable 
distributed weight, but not very much 
of a concentrated one. When the painted 
canvas cover is clapped on the American 
line-tub, the boat looks as if it were 
pulling off with a prodigious great 
wedding-cake to present to the whales.

Both ends of the line are exposed; the 
lower end terminating in an eye-splice 
or loop coming up from the bottom 
against the side of the tub, and 
hanging over its edge completely 
disengaged from everything. This 
arrangement of the lower end is 
necessary on two accounts. First: In 
order to facilitate the fastening to it 
of an additional line from a 
neighboring boat, in case the stricken 
whale should sound so deep as to 
threaten to carry off the entire line 
originally attached to the harpoon. In 
these instances, the whale of course is 
shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, 
from the one boat to the other; though 
the first boat always hovers at hand to 
assist its consort. Second: This 
arrangement is indispensable for common 
safety’s sake; for were the lower end 
of the line in any way attached to the 
boat, and were the whale then to run 
the line out to the end almost in a 
single, smoking minute as he sometimes 
does, he would not stop there, for the 
doomed boat would infallibly be dragged 
down after him into the profundity of 
the sea; and in that case no town-crier 
would ever find her again.

Before lowering the boat for the chase, 
the upper end of the line is taken aft 
from the tub, and passing round the 
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 still a little 
further aft, and is then attached to 
the short-warp—the rope which is 
immediately connected with the harpoon; 
but previous to that connexion, the 
short-warp goes through sundry 
mystifications too tedious to detail.

Thus the whale-line folds the whole 
boat in its complicated coils, twisting 
and writhing around it in almost every 
direction. All the oarsmen are involved 
in its perilous contortions; so that to 
the timid eye of the landsman, they 
seem as Indian jugglers, with the 
deadliest snakes sportively festooning 
their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal 
woman, for the first time, seat himself 
amid those hempen intricacies, and 
while straining his utmost at the oar, 
bethink him that at any unknown instant 
the harpoon may be darted, and all 
these horrible contortions be put in 
play like ringed lightnings; he cannot 
be thus circumstanced without a shudder 
that makes the very marrow in his bones 
to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. 
Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot 
habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more 
merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter 
repartees, you never heard over your 
mahogany, than you will hear over the 
half-inch white cedar of the 
whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman’s 
nooses; and, like the six burghers of 
Calais before King Edward, the six men 
composing the crew pull into the jaws 
of death, with a halter around every 
neck, as you may say.

Perhaps a very little thought will now 
enable you to account for those 
repeated whaling disasters—some few of 
which are casually chronicled—of this 
man or that man being taken out of the 
boat by the line, and lost. For, when 
the line is darting out, to be seated 
then in the boat, is like being seated 
in the midst of the manifold whizzings 
of a steam-engine in full play, when 
every flying beam, and shaft, and 
wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for 
you cannot sit motionless in the heart 
of these perils, because the boat is 
rocking like a cradle, and you are 
pitched one way and the other, without 
the slightest warning; and only by a 
certain self-adjusting buoyancy and 
simultaneousness of volition and 
action, can you escape being made a 
Mazeppa of, and run away with where the 
all-seeing sun himself could never 
pierce you out.

Again: as the profound calm which only 
apparently precedes and prophesies of 
the storm, is perhaps more awful than 
the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm 
is but the wrapper and envelope of the 
storm; and contains it in itself, as 
the seemingly harmless rifle holds the 
fatal powder, and the ball, and the 
explosion; so the graceful repose of 
the line, as it silently serpentines 
about the oarsmen before being brought 
into actual play—this is a thing which 
carries more of true terror than any 
other aspect of this dangerous affair. 
But why say more? All men live 
enveloped in whale-lines. All are born 
with halters round their necks; but it 
is only when caught in the swift, 
sudden turn of death, that mortals 
realize the silent, subtle, 
ever-present perils of life. And if you 
be a philosopher, though seated in the 
whale-boat, you 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 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.

If to Starbuck the apparition of the 
Squid was a thing of portents, to 
Queequeg it was quite a different 
object.

“When you see him ‘quid,” said the 
savage, honing his harpoon in the bow 
of his hoisted boat, “then you quick 
see him ‘parm whale.”

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

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

Ere forgetfulness altogether came over 
me, I had noticed that the seamen at 
the main and 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 indolent crests; and 
across the wide trance of the sea, east 
nodded to west, and the sun over all.

Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting 
beneath my closed eyes; like vices my 
hands grasped the shrouds; some 
invisible, gracious agency preserved 
me; with a shock I came back to life. 
And lo! close under our lee, not forty 
fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay 
rolling in the water like the capsized 
hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy 
back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening 
in the sun’s rays like a mirror. But 
lazily undulating in the trough of the 
sea, and ever and anon tranquilly 
spouting his 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 the three notes from aloft, 
shouted forth the accustomed cry, as 
the great fish slowly and regularly 
spouted the sparkling brine into the 
air.

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

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

“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.*

*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 sharppointed New York 
pilot-boat.

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

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

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

“Ka-la! Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as 
if smacking his lips over a mouthful of 
Grenadier’s steak. And thus with oars 
and yells the keels cut the sea. 
Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in 
the van, still encouraged his men to 
the onset, all the while puffing the 
smoke from his mouth. Like desperadoes 
they tugged and they strained, till the 
welcome cry was heard—“Stand up, 
Tashtego!—give it to him!” The harpoon 
was hurled. “Stern all!” The oarsmen 
backed water; the same moment something 
went hot and hissing along every one of 
their wrists. It was the magical line. 
An instant before, Stubb had swiftly 
caught two additional turns with it 
round the loggerhead, whence, by reason 
of its increased rapid circlings, a 
hempen blue smoke now jetted up and 
mingled with the steady fumes from his 
pipe. As the line passed round and 
round the loggerhead; so also, just 
before reaching that point, it 
blisteringly passed through and through 
both of Stubb’s hands, from which the 
hand-cloths, or squares of quilted 
canvas sometimes worn at these times, 
had accidentally dropped. It was like 
holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged 
sword by the blade, and that enemy all 
the time striving to wrest it out of 
your clutch.

“Wet the line! wet the line!” cried 
Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by 
the tub) who, snatching off his hat, 
dashed sea-water into it.* 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.

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

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

“Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the 
bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in 
his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the 
boat ranged along the fish’s flank. 
When reaching far over the bow, Stubb 
slowly churned his long sharp lance 
into the fish, and kept it there, 
carefully churning and churning, as if 
cautiously seeking to feel after some 
gold watch that the whale might have 
swallowed, and which he was fearful of 
breaking ere he could hook it out. But 
that gold watch he sought was the 
innermost life of the fish. And now it 
is struck; for, starting from his 
trance into that unspeakable thing 
called his “flurry,” the monster 
horribly wallowed in his blood, 
overwrapped himself in impenetrable, 
mad, boiling spray, so that the 
imperilled craft, instantly dropping 
astern, had much ado blindly to 
struggle out from that phrensied 
twilight into the clear air of the day.

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

“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.

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

 

CHAPTER 62. The Dart.

A word concerning an incident in the 
last chapter.

According to the invariable usage of 
the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off 
from the ship, with the headsman or 
whale-killer as temporary steersman, 
and the harpooneer or whale-fastener 
pulling the foremost oar, the one known 
as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a 
strong, nervous arm to strike the first 
iron into the fish; for often, in what 
is called a long dart, the heavy 
implement has to be flung to the 
distance of twenty or thirty feet. But 
however prolonged and exhausting the 
chase, the harpooneer is expected to 
pull his oar meanwhile to the 
uttermost; indeed, he is expected to 
set an example of superhuman activity 
to the rest, not only by incredible 
rowing, but by repeated loud and 
intrepid exclamations; and what it is 
to keep shouting at the top of one’s 
compass, while all the other muscles 
are strained and half started—what that 
is none know but those who have tried 
it. For one, I cannot bawl very 
heartily and work very recklessly at 
one and the same time. In this 
straining, bawling state, then, with 
his back to the fish, all at once the 
exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting 
cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He 
now has to drop and secure his oar, 
turn round on his centre half way, 
seize his harpoon from the crotch, and 
with what little strength may remain, 
he essays to pitch it somehow into the 
whale. No wonder, taking the whole 
fleet of whalemen in a body, that out 
of fifty fair chances for a dart, not 
five are successful; no wonder that so 
many hapless harpooneers are madly 
cursed and disrated; no wonder that 
some of them actually burst their 
blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder 
that some sperm whalemen are absent 
four years with four barrels; no wonder 
that to many ship owners, whaling is 
but a losing concern; for it is the 
harpooneer that makes the voyage, and 
if you take the breath out of his body 
how can you expect to find it there 
when most wanted!

Again, if the dart be successful, then 
at the second critical instant, that 
is, when the whale starts to run, the 
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. 

 

CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; 
out of them, the twigs. So, in 
productive subjects, grow the chapters.

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

But these two harpoons, each by its own 
cord, are both connected with the line; 
the object being this: to dart them 
both, if possible, one instantly after 
the other into the same whale; so that 
if, in the coming drag, one should draw 
out, the other may still retain a hold. 
It is a doubling of the chances. But it 
very often happens that owing to the 
instantaneous, violent, convulsive 
running of the whale upon receiving the 
first iron, it becomes impossible for 
the harpooneer, however lightning-like 
in his movements, to pitch the second 
iron into him. Nevertheless, as the 
second iron is already connected with 
the line, and the line is running, 
hence that weapon must, at all events, 
be anticipatingly tossed out of the 
boat, somehow and somewhere; else the 
most terrible jeopardy would involve 
all hands. Tumbled into the water, it 
accordingly is in such cases; the spare 
coils of box line (mentioned in a 
preceding chapter) making this feat, in 
most instances, prudently practicable. 
But this critical act is not always 
unattended with the saddest and most 
fatal casualties.

Furthermore: you must know that when 
the second iron is thrown overboard, it 
thenceforth becomes a dangling, 
sharp-edged terror, skittishly 
curvetting about both boat and whale, 
entangling the lines, or cutting them, 
and making a prodigious sensation in 
all directions. Nor, in general, is it 
possible to secure it again until the 
whale is fairly captured and a corpse.

Consider, now, how it must be in the 
case of four boats all engaging one 
unusually strong, active, and knowing 
whale; when owing to these qualities in 
him, as well as to the thousand 
concurring accidents of such an 
audacious enterprise, eight or ten 
loose second irons may be 
simultaneously dangling about him. For, 
of course, each boat is supplied with 
several harpoons to bend on to the line 
should the first one be ineffectually 
darted without recovery. All these 
particulars are faithfully narrated 
here, as they will not fail to 
elucidate several most important, 
however intricate passages, in scenes 
hereafter to be painted. 

 

CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.

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

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

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of 
this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced 
his customary activity, to call it so; 
yet now that the creature was dead, 
some vague dissatisfaction, or 
impatience, or despair, seemed working 
in him; as if the sight of that dead 
body reminded him that Moby Dick was 
yet to be slain; and though a thousand 
other whales were brought to his ship, 
all that would not one jot advance his 
grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you 
would have thought from the sound on 
the Pequod’s decks, that all hands were 
preparing to cast anchor in the deep; 
for heavy chains are being dragged 
along the deck, and thrust rattling out 
of the port-holes. But by those 
clanking links, the vast corpse itself, 
not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by 
the head to the stern, and by the tail 
to the bows, the whale now lies with 
its black hull close to the vessel’s 
and seen through the darkness of the 
night, which obscured the spars and 
rigging aloft, the two—ship and whale, 
seemed yoked together like colossal 
bullocks, whereof one reclines while 
the other remains standing.*

*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, 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 (at 
least before realizing the proceeds of 
the voyage), yet now and then you find 
some of these Nantucketers who have a 
genuine relish for that particular part 
of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; 
comprising the tapering extremity of 
the body.

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

Though amid all the smoking horror and 
diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will 
be seen longingly gazing up to the 
ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a 
table where red meat is being carved, 
ready to bolt down every killed man 
that is tossed to them; and though, 
while the valiant butchers over the 
deck-table are thus cannibally carving 
each other’s live meat with 
carving-knives all gilded and 
tasselled, the sharks, also, with their 
jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely 
carving away under the table at the 
dead meat; and though, were you to turn 
the whole affair upside down, it would 
still be pretty much the same thing, 
that is to say, a shocking sharkish 
business enough for all parties; and 
though sharks also are the invariable 
outriders of all slave ships crossing 
the Atlantic, systematically trotting 
alongside, to be handy in case a parcel 
is to be carried anywhere, or a dead 
slave to be decently buried; and though 
one or two other like instances might 
be set down, touching the set terms, 
places, and occasions, when sharks do 
most socially congregate, and most 
hilariously feast; yet is there no 
conceivable time or occasion when you 
will find them in such countless 
numbers, and in gayer or more jovial 
spirits, than around a dead sperm 
whale, moored by night to a whaleship 
at sea. If you have never seen that 
sight, then suspend your decision about 
the propriety of devil-worship, and the 
expediency of conciliating the devil.

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

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

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

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

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

“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to 
say dat you must stop dat dam noise 
dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ 
ob de lips! Massa Stubb say dat you can 
fill your dam bellies up to de 
hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop 
dat dam racket!”

“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, 
accompanying the word with a sudden 
slap on the shoulder,—“Cook! why, damn 
your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way 
when you’re preaching. That’s no way to 
convert sinners, cook!”

“Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” 
sullenly turning to go.

“No, cook; go on, go on.”

“Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—

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

“Do you is all sharks, and by natur 
wery woracious, yet I zay to you, 
fellow-critters, dat dat 
woraciousness—‘top dat dam slappin’ ob 
de tail! How you tink to hear, spose 
you keep up such a dam slappin’ and 
bitin’ dare?”

“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I 
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; dat is 
natur, and can’t be helped; but to 
gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de 
pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you 
gobern de shark in you, why den you be 
angel; for all angel is not’ing more 
dan de shark well goberned. Now, look 
here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be 
cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat 
whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out 
your neighbour’s mout, I say. Is not 
one shark dood right as toder to dat 
whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de 
right to dat whale; dat whale belong to 
some one else. I know some o’ you has 
berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but 
den de brig mouts sometimes has de 
small bellies; so dat de brigness of de 
mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit 
off de blubber for de small fry ob 
sharks, dat can’t get into de scrouge 
to help demselves.”

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

“No use goin’ on; de dam willains will 
keep a scougin’ and slappin’ each oder, 
Massa Stubb; dey don’t hear one word; 
no use a-preaching to such dam g’uttons 
as you call ‘em, till dare bellies is 
full, and dare bellies is bottomless; 
and when dey do get ‘em full, dey wont 
hear you den; for den dey sink in the 
sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and 
can’t hear noting at all, no more, for 
eber and eber.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What dat do wid de ‘teak,” said the 
old black, testily.

“Silence! How old are you, cook?”

“‘Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily 
muttered.

“And 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 ferry-boat, 
goin’ ober de Roanoke.”

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

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

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

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

“Come back 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 negro 
muttered, “Best cooked ‘teak I eber 
taste; joosy, berry joosy.”

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

“Passed one once in Cape-Down,” said 
the old man sullenly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.

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

It is upon record, that three centuries 
ago the tongue of the Right Whale was 
esteemed a great delicacy in France, 
and commanded large prices there. Also, 
that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain 
cook of the court obtained a handsome 
reward for inventing an admirable sauce 
to be eaten with barbacued porpoises, 
which, you remember, are a species of 
whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this 
day considered fine eating. The meat is 
made into balls about the size of 
billiard balls, and being well seasoned 
and spiced might be taken for 
turtle-balls or veal balls. The old 
monks of Dunfermline were very fond of 
them. They had a great porpoise grant 
from the crown.

The fact is, that among his hunters at 
least, the whale would by all hands be 
considered a noble dish, were there not 
so much of him; but when you come to 
sit down before a meat-pie nearly one 
hundred feet long, it takes away your 
appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of 
men like Stubb, nowadays partake of 
cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are 
not so fastidious. We all know how they 
live upon whales, and have rare old 
vintages of prime old train oil. 
Zogranda, one of their most famous 
doctors, recommends strips of blubber 
for infants, as being exceedingly juicy 
and nourishing. And this reminds me 
that certain Englishmen, who long ago 
were accidentally left in Greenland by 
a whaling vessel—that these men 
actually lived for several months on 
the mouldy scraps of whales which had 
been left ashore after trying out the 
blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these 
scraps are called “fritters”; which, 
indeed, they greatly resemble, being 
brown and crisp, and smelling something 
like old Amsterdam housewives’ 
dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. 
They have such an eatable look that the 
most self-denying stranger can hardly 
keep his hands off.

But what further depreciates the whale 
as a civilized dish, is his exceeding 
richness. He is the great prize ox of 
the sea, too fat to be delicately good. 
Look at his hump, which would be as 
fine eating as the buffalo’s (which is 
esteemed a rare dish), were it not such 
a solid pyramid of fat. But the 
spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy 
that is; like the transparent, 
half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut 
in the third month of its growth, yet 
far too rich to supply a substitute for 
butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen 
have a method of absorbing it into some 
other substance, and then partaking of 
it. In the long try watches of the 
night it is a common thing for the 
seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into 
the huge oil-pots and let them fry 
there awhile. Many a good supper have I 
thus made.

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

It is not, perhaps, entirely because 
the whale is so excessively unctuous 
that landsmen seem to regard the eating 
of him with abhorrence; that appears to 
result, in some way, from the 
consideration before mentioned: i.e. 
that a man should eat a newly murdered 
thing of the sea, and eat it too by its 
own light. But no doubt the first man 
that ever murdered an ox was regarded 
as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and 
if he had been put on his trial by 
oxen, he certainly would have been; and 
he certainly deserved it if any 
murderer does. Go to the meat-market of 
a Saturday night and see the crowds of 
live bipeds staring up at the long rows 
of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight 
take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? 
Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I 
tell you it will be more tolerable for 
the Fejee that salted down a lean 
missionary in his cellar against a 
coming famine; it will be more 
tolerable for that provident Fejee, I 
say, in the day of judgment, than for 
thee, civilized and enlightened 
gourmand, who nailest geese to the 
ground and feastest on their bloated 
livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own 
light, does he? and that is adding 
insult to injury, is it? Look at your 
knife-handle, there, my civilized and 
enlightened gourmand dining off that 
roast beef, what is that handle made 
of?—what but the bones of the brother 
of the very ox you are eating? And what 
do you pick your teeth with, after 
devouring that fat goose? With a 
feather of the same fowl. 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. 

 

CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.

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

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

Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the 
anchor-watch after his supper was 
concluded; and when, accordingly, 
Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came 
on deck, no small excitement was 
created among the sharks; for 
immediately suspending the cutting 
stages over the side, and lowering 
three lanterns, so that they cast long 
gleams of light over the turbid sea, 
these two mariners, darting their long 
whaling-spades, kept up an incessant 
murdering of the sharks,* by striking 
the keen steel deep into their skulls, 
seemingly their only vital part. But in 
the foamy confusion of their mixed and 
struggling hosts, the marksmen could 
not always hit their mark; and this 
brought about new revelations of the 
incredible ferocity of the foe. They 
viciously snapped, not only at each 
other’s disembowelments, but like 
flexible bows, bent round, and bit 
their own; till those entrails seemed 
swallowed over and over again by the 
same mouth, to be oppositely voided by 
the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It 
was unsafe to meddle with the corpses 
and ghosts of these creatures. A sort 
of generic or Pantheistic vitality 
seemed to lurk in their very joints and 
bones, after what might be called the 
individual life had departed. Killed 
and hoisted on deck for the sake of his 
skin, one of these sharks almost took 
poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried 
to shut down the dead lid of his 
murderous jaw.

*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.

“Queequeg no care what god made him 
shark,” said the savage, agonizingly 
lifting his hand up and down; “wedder 
Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god 
wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.” 

 

CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.

It was a Saturday night, and such a 
Sabbath as followed! Ex officio 
professors of Sabbath breaking are all 
whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned 
into what seemed a shamble; every 
sailor a butcher. You would have 
thought we were offering up ten 
thousand red oxen to the sea gods.

In the first place, the enormous 
cutting tackles, among other ponderous 
things comprising a cluster of blocks 
generally painted green, and which no 
single man can possibly lift—this vast 
bunch of grapes was swayed up to the 
main-top and firmly lashed to the lower 
mast-head, the strongest point anywhere 
above a ship’s deck. The end of the 
hawser-like rope winding through these 
intricacies, was then conducted to the 
windlass, and the huge lower block of 
the tackles was swung over the whale; 
to this block the great blubber hook, 
weighing some one hundred pounds, was 
attached. And now suspended in stages 
over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the 
mates, armed with their long spades, 
began cutting a hole in the body for 
the insertion of the hook just above 
the nearest of the two side-fins. This 
done, a broad, semicircular line is cut 
round the hole, the hook is inserted, 
and the main body of the crew striking 
up a wild chorus, now commence heaving 
in one dense crowd at the windlass. 
When instantly, the entire ship careens 
over on her side; every bolt in her 
starts like the nail-heads of an old 
house in frosty weather; she trembles, 
quivers, and nods her frighted 
mast-heads to the sky. More and more 
she leans over to the whale, while 
every gasping heave of the windlass is 
answered by a helping heave from the 
billows; till at last, a swift, 
startling snap is heard; with a great 
swash the ship rolls upwards and 
backwards from the whale, and the 
triumphant tackle rises into sight 
dragging after it the disengaged 
semicircular end of the first strip of 
blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes 
the whale precisely as the rind does an 
orange, so is it stripped off from the 
body precisely as an orange is 
sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. 
For the strain constantly kept up by 
the windlass continually keeps the 
whale rolling over and over in the 
water, and as the blubber in one strip 
uniformly peels off along the line 
called the “scarf,” simultaneously cut 
by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, 
the mates; and just as fast as it is 
thus peeled off, and indeed by that 
very act itself, it is all the time 
being hoisted higher and higher aloft 
till its upper end grazes the main-top; 
the men at the windlass then cease 
heaving, and for a moment or two the 
prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to 
and fro as if let down from the sky, 
and every one present must take good 
heed to dodge it when it swings, else 
it may box his ears and pitch him 
headlong overboard.

One of the attending harpooneers now 
advances with a long, keen weapon 
called a boarding-sword, and watching 
his chance he dexterously slices out a 
considerable hole in the lower part of 
the swaying mass. Into this hole, the 
end of the second alternating great 
tackle is then hooked so as to retain a 
hold upon the blubber, in order to 
prepare for what follows. Whereupon, 
this accomplished swordsman, warning 
all hands to stand off, once more makes 
a scientific dash at the mass, and with 
a few sidelong, desperate, lunging 
slicings, severs it completely in 
twain; so that while the short lower 
part is still fast, the long upper 
strip, called a blanket-piece, swings 
clear, and is all ready for lowering. 
The heavers forward now resume their 
song, and while the one tackle is 
peeling and hoisting a second strip 
from the whale, the other is slowly 
slackened away, and down goes the first 
strip through the main hatchway right 
beneath, into an unfurnished parlor 
called the blubber-room. Into this 
twilight apartment sundry nimble hands 
keep coiling away the long 
blanket-piece as if it were a great 
live mass of plaited serpents. And thus 
the work proceeds; the two tackles 
hoisting and lowering simultaneously; 
both whale and windlass heaving, the 
heavers singing, the blubber-room 
gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, 
the ship straining, and all hands 
swearing occasionally, by way of 
assuaging the general friction. 

 

CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.

I have given no small attention to that 
not unvexed subject, the skin of the 
whale. I have had controversies about 
it with experienced whalemen afloat, 
and learned naturalists ashore. My 
original opinion remains unchanged; but 
it is only an opinion.

The question is, what and where is the 
skin of the whale? Already you know 
what his blubber is. That blubber is 
something of the consistence of firm, 
close-grained beef, but tougher, more 
elastic and compact, and ranges from 
eight or ten to twelve and fifteen 
inches in thickness.

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

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

In life, the visible surface of the 
Sperm Whale is not the least among the 
many marvels he presents. Almost 
invariably it is all over obliquely 
crossed and re-crossed with numberless 
straight marks in thick array, 
something like those in the finest 
Italian line engravings. But these 
marks do not seem to be impressed upon 
the isinglass substance above 
mentioned, but seem to be seen through 
it, as if they were engraved upon the 
body itself. Nor is this all. In some 
instances, to the quick, observant eye, 
those linear marks, as in a veritable 
engraving, but afford the ground for 
far other delineations. These are 
hieroglyphical; that is, if you call 
those mysterious cyphers on the walls 
of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is 
the proper word to use in the present 
connexion. By my retentive memory of 
the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale 
in particular, I was much struck with a 
plate representing the old Indian 
characters chiselled on the famous 
hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of 
the Upper Mississippi. Like those 
mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked 
whale remains undecipherable. This 
allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me 
of another thing. Besides all the other 
phenomena which the exterior of the 
Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom 
displays the back, and more especially 
his flanks, effaced in great part of 
the regular linear appearance, by 
reason of numerous rude scratches, 
altogether of an irregular, random 
aspect. I should say that those New 
England rocks on the sea-coast, which 
Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of 
violent scraping contact with vast 
floating icebergs—I should say, that 
those rocks must not a little resemble 
the Sperm Whale in this particular. It 
also seems to me that such scratches in 
the whale are probably made by hostile 
contact with other whales; for I have 
most remarked them in the large, 
full-grown bulls of the species.

A word or two more concerning this 
matter of the skin or blubber of the 
whale. It has already been said, that 
it is stript from him in long pieces, 
called blanket-pieces. Like most 
sea-terms, this one is very happy and 
significant. For the whale is indeed 
wrapt up in his blubber as in a real 
blanket or counterpane; or, still 
better, an Indian poncho slipt over his 
head, and skirting his extremity. It is 
by reason of this cosy blanketing of 
his body, that the whale is enabled to 
keep himself comfortable in all 
weathers, in all seas, times, and 
tides. What would become of a Greenland 
whale, say, in those shuddering, icy 
seas of the North, if unsupplied with 
his cosy surtout? True, other fish are 
found exceedingly brisk in those 
Hyperborean waters; but these, be it 
observed, are your cold-blooded, 
lungless fish, whose very bellies are 
refrigerators; creatures, that warm 
themselves under the lee of an iceberg, 
as a traveller in winter would bask 
before an inn fire; whereas, like man, 
the whale has lungs and warm blood. 
Freeze his blood, and he dies. How 
wonderful is it then—except after 
explanation—that this great monster, to 
whom corporeal warmth is as 
indispensable as it is to man; how 
wonderful that he should be found at 
home, immersed to his lips for life in 
those Arctic waters! where, when seamen 
fall overboard, they are sometimes 
found, months afterwards, 
perpendicularly frozen into the hearts 
of fields of ice, as a fly is found 
glued in amber. But more surprising is 
it to know, as has been proved by 
experiment, that the blood of a Polar 
whale is warmer than that of a Borneo 
negro in summer.

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

But how easy and how hopeless to teach 
these fine things! Of erections, how 
few are domed like St. Peter’s! of 
creatures, how few vast as the whale! 

 

CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.

Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go 
astern!

The vast tackles have now done their 
duty. The peeled white body of the 
beheaded whale flashes like a marble 
sepulchre; though changed in hue, it 
has not perceptibly lost anything in 
bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it 
floats more and more away, the water 
round it torn and splashed by the 
insatiate sharks, and the air above 
vexed with rapacious flights of 
screaming fowls, whose beaks are like 
so many insulting poniards in the 
whale. The vast white headless phantom 
floats further and further from the 
ship, and every rod that it so floats, 
what seem square roods of sharks and 
cubic roods of fowls, augment the 
murderous din. For hours and hours from 
the almost stationary ship that hideous 
sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded 
and mild azure sky, upon the fair face 
of the pleasant sea, wafted by the 
joyous breezes, that great mass of 
death floats on and on, till lost in 
infinite perspectives.

There’s a most doleful and most mocking 
funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious 
mourning, the air-sharks all 
punctiliously in black or speckled. In 
life but few of them would have helped 
the whale, I ween, if peradventure he 
had needed it; but upon the banquet of 
his funeral they most piously do 
pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of 
earth! from which not the mightiest 
whale is free.

Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the 
body is, a vengeful ghost survives and 
hovers over it to scare. Espied by some 
timid man-of-war or blundering 
discovery-vessel from afar, when the 
distance obscuring the swarming fowls, 
nevertheless still shows the white mass 
floating in the sun, and the white 
spray heaving high against it; 
straightway the whale’s unharming 
corpse, with trembling fingers is set 
down in the log—shoals, rocks, and 
breakers hereabouts: beware! And for 
years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun 
the place; leaping over it as silly 
sheep leap over a vacuum, because their 
leader originally leaped there when a 
stick was held. There’s your law of 
precedents; there’s your utility of 
traditions; there’s the story of your 
obstinate survival of old beliefs never 
bottomed on the earth, and now not even 
hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!

Thus, while in life the great whale’s 
body may have been a real terror to his 
foes, in his death his ghost becomes a 
powerless panic to a world.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my 
friend? There are other ghosts than the 
Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than 
Doctor Johnson who believe in them. 

 

CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.

It should not have been omitted that 
previous to completely stripping the 
body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. 
Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale 
is a scientific anatomical feat, upon 
which experienced whale surgeons very 
much pride themselves: and not without 
reason.

Consider that the whale has nothing 
that can properly be called a neck; on 
the contrary, where his head and body 
seem to join, there, in that very 
place, is the thickest part of him. 
Remember, also, that the surgeon must 
operate from above, some eight or ten 
feet intervening between him and his 
subject, and that subject almost hidden 
in a 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 skilfully steer clear of all 
adjacent, interdicted parts, and 
exactly divide the spine at a critical 
point hard by its insertion into the 
skull. Do you not marvel, then, at 
Stubb’s boast, that he demanded but ten 
minutes to behead a sperm whale?

When first severed, the head is dropped 
astern and held there by a cable till 
the body is stripped. That done, if it 
belong to a small whale it is hoisted 
on deck to be deliberately disposed of. 
But, with a full grown leviathan this 
is impossible; for the sperm whale’s 
head embraces nearly one third of his 
entire bulk, and completely to suspend 
such a burden as that, even by the 
immense tackles of a whaler, this were 
as vain a thing as to attempt weighing 
a Dutch barn in jewellers’ scales.

The Pequod’s whale being decapitated 
and the body stripped, the head was 
hoisted against the ship’s side—about 
half way out of the sea, so that it 
might yet in great part be buoyed up by 
its native element. And there with the 
strained craft steeply leaning over to 
it, by reason of the enormous downward 
drag from the lower mast-head, and 
every yard-arm on that side projecting 
like a crane over the waves; there, 
that blood-dripping head hung to the 
Pequod’s waist like the giant 
Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith.

When this last task was accomplished it 
was noon, and the seamen went below to 
their dinner. Silence reigned over the 
before tumultuous but now deserted 
deck. An intense copper calm, like a 
universal yellow lotus, was more and 
more unfolding its noiseless 
measureless leaves upon the sea.

A short space elapsed, and up into this 
noiselessness came Ahab alone from his 
cabin. Taking a few turns on the 
quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over 
the side, then slowly getting into the 
main-chains he took Stubb’s long 
spade—still remaining there after the 
whale’s Decapitation—and striking it 
into the lower part of the 
half-suspended mass, placed its other 
end crutch-wise under one arm, and so 
stood leaning over with eyes 
attentively fixed on this head.

It was a black and hooded head; and 
hanging there in the midst of so 
intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s 
in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and 
venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, 
though ungarnished with a beard, yet 
here and there lookest hoary with 
mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us 
the secret thing that is in thee. Of 
all divers, thou hast dived the 
deepest. That head upon which the upper 
sun now gleams, has moved amid this 
world’s foundations. Where unrecorded 
names and navies rust, and untold hopes 
and anchors rot; where in her murderous 
hold this frigate earth is ballasted 
with bones of millions of the drowned; 
there, in that awful water-land, there 
was thy most familiar home. Thou hast 
been where bell or diver never went; 
hast slept by many a sailor’s side, 
where sleepless mothers would give 
their lives to lay them down. Thou 
saw’st the locked lovers when leaping 
from their flaming ship; heart to heart 
they sank beneath the exulting wave; 
true to each other, when heaven seemed 
false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered 
mate when tossed by pirates from the 
midnight deck; for hours he fell into 
the deeper midnight of the insatiate 
maw; and his murderers still sailed on 
unharmed—while swift lightnings 
shivered the neighboring ship that 
would have borne a righteous husband to 
outstretched, longing arms. O head! 
thou hast seen enough to split the 
planets and make an infidel of Abraham, 
and not one syllable is thine!”

“Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice 
from the main-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 on matter, but has its cunning 
duplicate in mind.” 

 

CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.

Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; 
but the breeze came faster than the 
ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.

By and by, through the glass the 
stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads 
proved her a whale-ship. But as she was 
so far to windward, and shooting by, 
apparently making a passage to some 
other ground, the Pequod could not hope 
to reach her. So the signal was set to 
see what response would be made.

Here be it said, that like the vessels 
of military marines, the ships of the 
American Whale Fleet have each a 
private signal; all which signals being 
collected in a book with the names of 
the respective vessels attached, every 
captain is provided with it. Thereby, 
the whale commanders are enabled to 
recognise each other upon the ocean, 
even at considerable distances and with 
no small facility.

The Pequod’s signal was at last 
responded to by the stranger’s setting 
her own; which proved the ship to be 
the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her 
yards, she bore down, ranged abeam 
under the Pequod’s lee, and lowered a 
boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the 
side-ladder was being rigged by 
Starbuck’s order to accommodate the 
visiting captain, the stranger in 
question waved his hand from his boat’s 
stern in token of that proceeding being 
entirely unnecessary. It turned out 
that the Jeroboam had a malignant 
epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her 
captain, was fearful of infecting the 
Pequod’s company. For, though himself 
and boat’s crew remained untainted, and 
though his ship was half a rifle-shot 
off, and an incorruptible sea and air 
rolling and flowing between; yet 
conscientiously adhering to the timid 
quarantine of the land, he peremptorily 
refused to come into direct contact 
with the Pequod.

But this did by no means prevent all 
communications. Preserving an interval 
of some few yards between itself and 
the ship, the Jeroboam’s boat by the 
occasional use of its oars contrived to 
keep parallel to the Pequod, as she 
heavily forged through the sea (for by 
this time it blew very fresh), with her 
main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at 
times by the sudden onset of a large 
rolling wave, the boat would be pushed 
some way ahead; but would be soon 
skilfully brought to her proper 
bearings again. Subject to this, and 
other the like interruptions now and 
then, a conversation was sustained 
between the two parties; but at 
intervals not without still another 
interruption of a very different sort.

Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat, 
was a man of a singular appearance, 
even in that wild whaling life where 
individual notabilities make up all 
totalities. He was a small, short, 
youngish man, sprinkled all over his 
face with freckles, and wearing 
redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted, 
cabalistically-cut coat of a faded 
walnut tinge enveloped him; the 
overlapping sleeves of which were 
rolled up on his wrists. A deep, 
settled, fanatic delirium was in his 
eyes.

So soon as this figure had been first 
descried, Stubb had exclaimed—“That’s 
he! that’s he!—the long-togged 
scaramouch the Town-Ho’s company told 
us of!” Stubb here alluded to a strange 
story told of the Jeroboam, and a 
certain man among her crew, some time 
previous when the Pequod spoke the 
Town-Ho. According to this account and 
what was subsequently learned, it 
seemed that the scaramouch in question 
had gained a wonderful ascendency over 
almost everybody in the Jeroboam. His 
story was this:

He had been originally nurtured among 
the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, 
where he had been a great prophet; in 
their cracked, secret meetings having 
several times descended from heaven by 
the way of a trap-door, announcing the 
speedy opening of the seventh vial, 
which he carried in his vest-pocket; 
but, which, instead of containing 
gunpowder, was supposed to be charged 
with laudanum. A strange, apostolic 
whim having seized him, he had left 
Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with 
that cunning peculiar to craziness, he 
assumed a steady, common-sense 
exterior, and offered himself as a 
green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam’s 
whaling voyage. They engaged him; but 
straightway upon the ship’s getting out 
of sight of land, his insanity broke 
out in a freshet. He announced himself 
as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded 
the captain to jump overboard. He 
published his manifesto, whereby he set 
himself forth as the deliverer of the 
isles of the sea and vicar-general of 
all Oceanica. The unflinching 
earnestness with which he declared 
these things;—the dark, daring play of 
his sleepless, excited imagination, and 
all the preternatural terrors of real 
delirium, united to invest this Gabriel 
in the minds of the majority of the 
ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of 
sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid 
of him. As such a man, however, was not 
of much practical use in the ship, 
especially as he refused to work except 
when he pleased, the incredulous 
captain would fain have been rid of 
him; but apprised that that 
individual’s intention was to land him 
in the first convenient port, the 
archangel forthwith opened all his 
seals and vials—devoting the ship and 
all hands to unconditional perdition, 
in case this intention was carried out. 
So strongly did he work upon his 
disciples among the crew, that at last 
in a body they went to the captain and 
told him if Gabriel was sent from the 
ship, not a man of them would remain. 
He was therefore forced to relinquish 
his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel 
to be any way maltreated, say or do 
what he would; so that it came to pass 
that Gabriel had the complete freedom 
of the ship. The consequence of all 
this was, that the archangel cared 
little or nothing for the captain and 
mates; and since the epidemic had 
broken out, he carried a higher hand 
than ever; declaring that the plague, 
as he called it, was at his sole 
command; nor should it be stayed but 
according to his good pleasure. The 
sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, 
and some of them fawned before him; in 
obedience to his instructions, 
sometimes rendering him personal 
homage, as to a god. Such things may 
seem incredible; but, however wondrous, 
they are true. Nor is the history of 
fanatics half so striking in respect to 
the measureless self-deception of the 
fanatic himself, as his measureless 
power of deceiving and bedevilling so 
many others. But it is time to return 
to the Pequod.

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

But now Gabriel started to his feet.

“Think, think of the fevers, yellow and 
bilious! Beware of the horrible plague!”

“Gabriel! Gabriel!” cried Captain 
Mayhew; “thou must either—” But that 
instant a headlong wave shot the boat 
far ahead, and its seethings drowned 
all speech.

“Hast thou seen the White Whale?” 
demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted 
back.

“Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven 
and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!”

“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—” But 
again the boat tore ahead as if dragged 
by fiends. Nothing was said for some 
moments, while a succession of riotous 
waves rolled by, which by one of those 
occasional caprices of the seas were 
tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the 
hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about 
very violently, and Gabriel was seen 
eyeing it with rather more 
apprehensiveness than his archangel 
nature seemed to warrant.

When this interlude was over, Captain 
Mayhew began a dark story concerning 
Moby Dick; not, however, without 
frequent interruptions from Gabriel, 
whenever his name was mentioned, and 
the crazy sea that seemed leagued with 
him.

It seemed that the Jeroboam had not 
long left home, when upon speaking a 
whale-ship, her people were reliably 
apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, 
and the havoc he had made. Greedily 
sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel 
solemnly warned the captain against 
attacking the White Whale, in case the 
monster should be seen; in his 
gibbering insanity, pronouncing the 
White Whale to be no less a being than 
the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers 
receiving the Bible. But when, some 
year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was 
fairly sighted from the mast-heads, 
Macey, the chief mate, burned with 
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 
the stranger captain could not forbear 
inquiring whether he intended to hunt 
the White Whale, if opportunity should 
offer. To which Ahab answered—“Aye.” 
Straightway, then, Gabriel once more 
started to his feet, glaring upon the 
old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with 
downward pointed finger—“Think, think 
of the blasphemer—dead, and down 
there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”

Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said 
to Mayhew, “Captain, I have just 
bethought me of my letter-bag; there is 
a letter for one of thy officers, if I 
mistake not. Starbuck, look over the 
bag.”

Every whale-ship takes out a goodly 
number of letters for various ships, 
whose delivery to the persons to whom 
they may be addressed, depends upon the 
mere chance of encountering them in the 
four oceans. Thus, most letters never 
reach their mark; and many are only 
received after attaining an age of two 
or three years or more.

Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in 
his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp, 
and covered with a dull, spotted, green 
mould, in consequence of being kept in 
a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a 
letter, Death himself might well have 
been the post-boy.

“Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give 
it me, man. Aye, aye, it’s but a dim 
scrawl;—what’s this?” As he was 
studying it out, Starbuck took a long 
cutting-spade pole, and with his knife 
slightly split the end, to insert the 
letter there, and in that way, hand it 
to the boat, without its coming any 
closer to the ship.

Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, 
muttered, “Mr. Har—yes, Mr. Harry—(a 
woman’s pinny hand,—the man’s wife, 
I’ll wager)—Aye—Mr. Harry Macey, Ship 
Jeroboam;—why it’s Macey, and he’s 
dead!”

“Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his 
wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but let me have 
it.”

“Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel 
to Ahab; “thou art soon going that way.”

“Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. 
“Captain Mayhew, stand by now to 
receive it”; and taking the fatal 
missive from Starbuck’s hands, he 
caught it in the slit of the pole, and 
reached it over towards the boat. But 
as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly 
desisted from rowing; the boat drifted 
a little towards the ship’s stern; so 
that, as if by magic, the letter 
suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s 
eager hand. He clutched it in an 
instant, seized the boat-knife, and 
impaling the letter on it, sent it thus 
loaded back into the ship. It fell at 
Ahab’s feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out 
to his comrades to give way with their 
oars, and in that manner the mutinous 
boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.

As, after this interlude, the seamen 
resumed their work upon the jacket of 
the whale, many strange things were 
hinted in reference to this wild 
affair. 

 

CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.

In the tumultuous business of 
cutting-in and attending to a whale, 
there is much running backwards and 
forwards among the crew. Now hands are 
wanted here, and then again hands are 
wanted there. There is no staying in 
any one place; for at one and the same 
time everything has to be done 
everywhere. It is much the same with 
him who endeavors the description of 
the scene. We must now retrace our way 
a little. It was mentioned that upon 
first breaking ground in the whale’s 
back, the blubber-hook was inserted 
into the original hole there cut by the 
spades of the mates. But how did so 
clumsy and weighty a mass as that same 
hook get fixed in that hole? It was 
inserted there by my particular friend 
Queequeg, whose duty it was, as 
harpooneer, to descend upon the 
monster’s back for the special purpose 
referred to. But in very many cases, 
circumstances require that the 
harpooneer shall remain on the whale 
till the whole 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 
his waist.

It was a humorously perilous business 
for both of us. For, before we proceed 
further, it must be said that the 
monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast 
to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and 
fast to my narrow leather one. So that 
for better or for worse, we two, for 
the time, were wedded; and should poor 
Queequeg sink to rise no more, then 
both usage and honour demanded, that 
instead of cutting the cord, it should 
drag me down in his wake. So, then, an 
elongated Siamese ligature united us. 
Queequeg was my own inseparable twin 
brother; nor could I any way get rid of 
the dangerous liabilities which the 
hempen bond entailed.

So strongly and metaphysically did I 
conceive of my situation then, that 
while earnestly watching his motions, I 
seemed distinctly to perceive that my 
own individuality was now merged in a 
joint stock company of two; that my 
free will had received a mortal wound; 
and that another’s mistake or 
misfortune might plunge innocent me 
into unmerited disaster and death. 
Therefore, I saw that here was a sort 
of interregnum in Providence; for its 
even-handed equity never could have so 
gross an injustice. And yet still 
further pondering—while I jerked him 
now and then from between the whale and 
ship, which would threaten to jam 
him—still further pondering, I say, I 
saw that this situation of mine was the 
precise situation of every mortal that 
breathes; only, in most cases, he, one 
way or other, has this Siamese 
connexion with a plurality of other 
mortals. If your banker breaks, you 
snap; if your apothecary by mistake 
sends you poison in your pills, you 
die. True, you may say that, by 
exceeding caution, you may possibly 
escape these and the multitudinous 
other evil chances of life. But handle 
Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I 
would, sometimes he jerked it so, that 
I came very near sliding overboard. Nor 
could I possibly forget that, do what I 
would, I only had the management of one 
end of it.*

*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 
carcass—the rabid creatures swarmed 
round it like bees in a beehive.

And right in among those sharks was 
Queequeg; who often pushed them aside 
with his floundering feet. A thing 
altogether incredible were it not that 
attracted by such prey as a dead whale, 
the otherwise miscellaneously 
carnivorous shark will seldom touch a 
man.

Nevertheless, it may well be believed 
that since they have such a ravenous 
finger in the pie, it is deemed but 
wise to look sharp to them. 
Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, 
with which I now and then jerked the 
poor fellow from too close a vicinity 
to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly 
ferocious shark—he was provided with 
still another protection. Suspended 
over the side in one of the stages, 
Tashtego and Daggoo continually 
flourished over his head a couple of 
keen whale-spades, wherewith they 
slaughtered as many sharks as they 
could reach. This procedure of theirs, 
to be sure, was very disinterested and 
benevolent of them. They meant 
Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but 
in their hasty zeal to befriend him, 
and from the circumstance that both he 
and the sharks were at times half 
hidden by the blood-muddled water, 
those indiscreet spades of theirs would 
come nearer amputating a leg than a 
tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, 
straining and gasping there with that 
great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I 
suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and 
gave up his life into the hands of his 
gods.

Well, well, my dear comrade and 
twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in 
and then slacked off the rope to every 
swell of the sea—what matters it, after 
all? Are you not the precious image of 
each and all of us men in this whaling 
world? That unsounded ocean you gasp 
in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; 
those spades, your friends; and what 
between sharks and spades you are in a 
sad pickle and peril, poor lad.

But courage! there is good cheer in 
store for you, Queequeg. For now, as 
with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the 
exhausted savage at last climbs up the 
chains and stands all dripping and 
involuntarily trembling over the side; 
the steward advances, and with a 
benevolent, consolatory glance hands 
him—what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands 
him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid 
ginger and water!

“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” 
suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. 
“Yes, this must be ginger,” peering 
into the as yet untasted cup. Then 
standing as if incredulous for a while, 
he calmly walked towards the astonished 
steward slowly saying, “Ginger? ginger? 
and will you have the goodness to tell 
me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the 
virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the 
sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to 
kindle a fire in this shivering 
cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is 
ginger? Sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer 
matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the 
devil is ginger, I say, that you offer 
this cup to our poor Queequeg here.”

“There is some sneaking Temperance 
Society movement about this business,” 
he suddenly added, now approaching 
Starbuck, who had just come from 
forward. “Will you look at that 
kannakin, sir; smell of it, if you 
please.” Then watching the mate’s 
countenance, he added, “The steward, 
Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer 
that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, 
there, this instant off the whale. Is 
the steward an apothecary, sir? and may 
I ask whether this is the sort of 
bitters by which he blows back the life 
into a half-drowned man?”

“I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is 
poor stuff enough.”

“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, 
“we’ll teach you to drug a harpooneer; 
none of your apothecary’s medicine 
here; you want to poison us, do ye? You 
have got out insurances on our lives 
and want to murder us all, and pocket 
the proceeds, do ye?”

“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it 
was Aunt Charity that brought the 
ginger on board; and bade me never give 
the harpooneers any spirits, but only 
this ginger-jub—so she called it.”

“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take 
that! and run along with ye to the 
lockers, and get something better. I 
hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is 
the captain’s orders—grog for the 
harpooneer on a whale.”

“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t 
hit him again, but—”

“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except 
when I hit a whale or something of that 
sort; and this fellow’s a weazel. What 
were you about saying, sir?”

“Only this: go down with him, and get 
what thou wantest thyself.”

When Stubb reappeared, he came with a 
dark flask in one hand, and a sort of 
tea-caddy in the other. The first 
contained strong spirits, and was 
handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt 
Charity’s gift, and that was freely 
given to the waves. 

 

CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a 
Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk

Over Him.

It must be borne in mind that all this 
time we have a Sperm Whale’s prodigious 
head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But 
we must let it continue hanging there a 
while till we can get a chance to 
attend to it. For the present other 
matters press, and the best we can do 
now for the head, is to pray heaven the 
tackles may hold.

Now, during the past night and 
forenoon, the Pequod had gradually 
drifted into a sea, which, by its 
occasional patches of yellow brit, gave 
unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right 
Whales, a species of the Leviathan that 
but few supposed to be at this 
particular time lurking anywhere near. 
And though all hands commonly disdained 
the capture of those inferior 
creatures; and though the Pequod was 
not commissioned to cruise for them at 
all, and though she had passed numbers 
of them near the Crozetts without 
lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm 
Whale had been brought alongside and 
beheaded, to the surprise of all, the 
announcement was made that a Right 
Whale should be captured that day, if 
opportunity offered.

Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts 
were seen to leeward; and two boats, 
Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in 
pursuit. Pulling further and further 
away, they at last became almost 
invisible to the men at the mast-head. 
But suddenly in the distance, they saw 
a great heap of tumultuous white water, 
and soon after news came from aloft 
that one or both the boats must be 
fast. An interval passed and the boats 
were in plain sight, in the act of 
being dragged right towards the ship by 
the towing whale. So close did the 
monster come to the hull, that at first 
it seemed as if he meant it malice; but 
suddenly going down in a maelstrom, 
within three rods of the planks, he 
wholly disappeared from view, as if 
diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was 
the cry from the ship to the boats, 
which, for one instant, seemed on the 
point of being brought with a deadly 
dash against the vessel’s side. But 
having plenty of line yet in the tubs, 
and the whale not sounding very 
rapidly, they paid out abundance of 
rope, and at the same time pulled with 
all their might so as to get ahead of 
the ship. For a few minutes the 
struggle was intensely critical; for 
while they still slacked out the 
tightened line in one direction, and 
still plied their oars in another, the 
contending strain threatened to take 
them under. But it was only a few feet 
advance they sought to gain. And they 
stuck to it till they did gain it; when 
instantly, a swift tremor was felt 
running like lightning along the keel, 
as the strained line, scraping beneath 
the ship, suddenly rose to view under 
her bows, snapping and quivering; and 
so flinging off its drippings, that the 
drops fell like bits of broken glass on 
the water, while the whale beyond also 
rose to sight, and once more the boats 
were free to fly. But the fagged whale 
abated his speed, and blindly altering 
his course, went round the stern of the 
ship towing the two boats after him, so 
that they performed a complete circuit.

Meantime, they hauled more and more 
upon their lines, till close flanking 
him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask 
with lance for lance; and thus round 
and round the Pequod the battle went, 
while the multitudes of sharks that had 
before swum round the Sperm Whale’s 
body, rushed to the fresh blood that 
was spilled, thirstily drinking at 
every new gash, as the eager Israelites 
did at the new bursting fountains that 
poured from the smitten rock.

At last his spout grew thick, and with 
a frightful roll and vomit, he turned 
upon his back a corpse.

While the two headsmen were engaged in 
making fast cords to his flukes, and in 
other ways getting the mass in 
readiness for towing, some conversation 
ensued between them.

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

“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling 
some spare line in the boat’s bow, “did 
you never hear that the ship which but 
once has a Sperm Whale’s head hoisted 
on her starboard side, and at the same 
time a Right Whale’s on the larboard; 
did you never hear, Stubb, that that 
ship can never afterwards capsize?”

“Why not?

“I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge 
ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he 
seems to know all about ships’ charms. 
But I sometimes think he’ll charm the 
ship to no good at last. I don’t half 
like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever 
notice how that tusk of his is a sort 
of carved into a snake’s head, Stubb?”

“Sink him! I never look at him at all; 
but if ever I get a chance of a dark 
night, and he standing hard by the 
bulwarks, and no one by; look down 
there, Flask”—pointing into the sea 
with a peculiar motion of both 
hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that 
Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. 
Do you believe that cock and bull story 
about his having been stowed away on 
board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The 
reason why you don’t see his tail, is 
because he tucks it up out of sight; he 
carries it coiled away in his pocket, I 
guess. Blast him! now that I think of 
it, he’s always wanting oakum to stuff 
into the toes of his boots.”

“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He 
hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve seen 
him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”

“No doubt, and it’s because of his 
cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye 
see, in the eye of the rigging.”

“What’s the old man have so much to do 
with him for?”

“Striking up a swap or a bargain, I 
suppose.”

“Bargain?—about what?”

“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard 
bent after that White Whale, and the 
devil there is trying to come round 
him, and get him to swap away his 
silver watch, or his soul, or something 
of that sort, and then he’ll surrender 
Moby Dick.”

“Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how 
can Fedallah do that?”

“I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is 
a curious chap, and a wicked one, I 
tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a 
sauntering into the old flag-ship once, 
switching his tail about devilish easy 
and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the 
old governor was at home. Well, he was 
at home, and asked the devil what he 
wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, 
up and says, ‘I want John.’ ‘What for?’ 
says the old governor. ‘What business 
is that of yours,’ says the devil, 
getting mad,—‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take 
him,’ says the governor—and by the 
Lord, Flask, if the devil didn’t give 
John the Asiatic cholera before he got 
through with him, I’ll eat this whale 
in one mouthful. But look sharp—ain’t 
you all ready there? Well, then, pull 
ahead, and let’s get the whale 
alongside.”

“I think I remember some such story as 
you were telling,” said Flask, when at 
last the two boats were slowly 
advancing with their burden towards the 
ship, “but I can’t remember where.”

“Three Spaniards? Adventures of those 
three bloody-minded soladoes? Did ye 
read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?”

“No: never saw such a book; heard of 
it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do 
you suppose that that devil you was 
speaking of just now, was the same you 
say is now on board the Pequod?”

“Am I the same man that helped kill 
this whale? Doesn’t the devil live for 
ever; who ever heard that the devil was 
dead? Did you ever see any parson a 
wearing mourning for the devil? And if 
the devil has a latch-key to get into 
the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose 
he can crawl into a 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 along in 
a row with that mast, for oughts, do 
you see; well, that wouldn’t begin to 
be Fedallah’s age. Nor all the coopers 
in creation couldn’t show hoops enough 
to make oughts enough.”

“But see here, Stubb, I thought you a 
little boasted just now, that you meant 
to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got 
a good chance. Now, if he’s so old as 
all those hoops of yours come to, and 
if he is going to live for ever, what 
good will it do to pitch him 
overboard—tell me that?

“Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”

“But he’d crawl back.”

“Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”

“Suppose he should take it into his 
head to duck you, though—yes, and drown 
you—what then?”

“I should like to see him try it; I’d 
give him such a pair of black eyes that 
he wouldn’t dare to show his face in 
the admiral’s cabin again for a long 
while, let alone down in the orlop 
there, where he lives, and hereabouts 
on the upper decks where he sneaks so 
much. Damn the devil, Flask; so you 
suppose I’m afraid of the devil? Who’s 
afraid of him, except the old governor 
who daresn’t catch him and put him in 
double-darbies, as he deserves, but 
lets him go about kidnapping people; 
aye, and signed a bond with him, that 
all the people the devil kidnapped, 
he’d roast for him? There’s a governor!”

“Do you suppose Fedallah wants to 
kidnap Captain Ahab?”

“Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before 
long, Flask. But I am going now to keep 
a sharp look-out on him; and if I see 
anything very suspicious going on, I’ll 
just take him by the nape of his neck, 
and say—Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t 
do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the 
Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket 
for his tail, take it to the capstan, 
and give him such a wrenching and 
heaving, that his tail will come short 
off at the stump—do you see; and then, 
I rather guess when he finds himself 
docked in that queer fashion, he’ll 
sneak off without the poor satisfaction 
of feeling his tail between his legs.”

“And what will you do with the tail, 
Stubb?”

“Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip 
when we get home;—what else?”

“Now, do you mean what you say, and 
have been saying all along, Stubb?”

“Mean or not mean, here we are at the 
ship.”

The boats were here hailed, to tow the 
whale on the larboard side, where fluke 
chains and other necessaries were 
already prepared for securing him.

“Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; 
“yes, you’ll soon see this right 
whale’s head hoisted up opposite that 
parmacetti’s.”

In good time, Flask’s saying proved 
true. As before, the Pequod steeply 
leaned over towards the sperm whale’s 
head, now, by the counterpoise of both 
heads, she regained her even keel; 
though sorely strained, you may well 
believe. So, when on one side you hoist 
in Locke’s head, you go over that way; 
but now, on the other side, hoist in 
Kant’s and you come back again; but in 
very poor plight. Thus, some minds for 
ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye 
foolish! throw all these thunder-heads 
overboard, and then you will float 
light and right.

In disposing of the body of a right 
whale, when brought alongside the ship, 
the same preliminary proceedings 
commonly take place as in the case of a 
sperm whale; only, in the latter 
instance, the head is cut off whole, 
but in the former the lips and tongue 
are separately removed and hoisted on 
deck, with all the well known black 
bone attached to what is called the 
crown-piece. But nothing like this, in 
the present case, had been done. The 
carcases of both whales had dropped 
astern; and the head-laden ship not a 
little resembled a mule carrying a pair 
of overburdening panniers.

Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing 
the right whale’s head, and ever and 
anon glancing from the deep wrinkles 
there to the lines in his own hand. And 
Ahab chanced so to stand, that the 
Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if 
the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it 
seemed only to blend with, and lengthen 
Ahab’s. As the crew toiled on, 
Laplandish speculations were bandied 
among them, concerning all these 
passing things. 

 

CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s 
Head—Contrasted View.

Here, now, are two great whales, laying 
their heads together; let us join them, 
and lay together our own.

Of the grand order of folio leviathans, 
the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are 
by far the most noteworthy. They are 
the only whales regularly hunted by 
man. To the Nantucketer, they present 
the two extremes of all the known 
varieties of the whale. As the external 
difference between them is mainly 
observable in their heads; and as a 
head of each is this moment hanging 
from the Pequod’s side; and as we may 
freely go from one to the other, by 
merely stepping across the deck:—where, 
I should like to know, will you obtain 
a better chance to study practical 
cetology than here?

In the first place, you are struck by 
the general contrast between these 
heads. Both are massive enough in all 
conscience; but there is a certain 
mathematical symmetry in the Sperm 
Whale’s which the Right Whale’s sadly 
lacks. There is more character in the 
Sperm Whale’s head. As you behold it, 
you involuntarily yield the immense 
superiority to him, in point of 
pervading dignity. In the present 
instance, too, this dignity is 
heightened by the pepper and salt 
colour of his head at the summit, 
giving token of advanced age and large 
experience. In short, he is what the 
fishermen technically call a 
“grey-headed whale.”

Let us now note what is least 
dissimilar in these heads—namely, the 
two most important organs, the eye and 
the ear. Far back on the side of the 
head, and low down, near the angle of 
either whale’s jaw, if you narrowly 
search, you will at last see a lashless 
eye, which you would fancy to be a 
young colt’s eye; so out of all 
proportion is it to the magnitude of 
the head.

Now, from this peculiar sideway 
position of the whale’s eyes, it is 
plain that he can never see an object 
which is exactly ahead, no more than he 
can one exactly astern. In a word, the 
position of the whale’s eyes 
corresponds to that of a man’s ears; 
and you may fancy, for yourself, how it 
would fare with you, did you sideways 
survey objects through your ears. You 
would find that you could only command 
some thirty degrees of vision in 
advance of the straight side-line of 
sight; and about thirty more behind it. 
If your bitterest foe were walking 
straight towards you, with dagger 
uplifted in broad day, you would not be 
able to see him, any more than if he 
were stealing upon you from behind. In 
a word, you would have two backs, so to 
speak; but, at the same time, also, two 
fronts (side fronts): for what is it 
that makes the front of a man—what, 
indeed, but his eyes?

Moreover, while in most other animals 
that I can now think of, the eyes are 
so planted as imperceptibly to blend 
their visual power, so as to produce 
one picture and not two to the brain; 
the peculiar position of the whale’s 
eyes, effectually divided as they are 
by many cubic feet of solid head, which 
towers between them like a great 
mountain separating two lakes in 
valleys; this, of course, must wholly 
separate the impressions which each 
independent organ imparts. The whale, 
therefore, must see one distinct 
picture on this side, and another 
distinct picture on that side; while 
all between must be profound darkness 
and nothingness to him. Man may, in 
effect, be said to look out on the 
world from a sentry-box with two joined 
sashes for his window. But with the 
whale, these two sashes are separately 
inserted, making two distinct windows, 
but sadly impairing the view. This 
peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a 
thing always to be borne in mind in the 
fishery; and to be remembered by the 
reader in some subsequent scenes.

A curious and most puzzling question 
might be started concerning this visual 
matter as touching the Leviathan. But I 
must be content with a hint. So long as 
a man’s eyes are open in the light, the 
act of seeing is involuntary; that is, 
he cannot then help mechanically seeing 
whatever objects are before him. 
Nevertheless, any one’s experience will 
teach him, that though he can take in 
an undiscriminating sweep of things at 
one glance, it is quite impossible for 
him, attentively, and completely, to 
examine any two things—however large or 
however small—at one and the same 
instant of time; never mind if they lie 
side by side and touch each other. But 
if you now come to separate these two 
objects, and surround each by a circle 
of profound darkness; then, in order to 
see one of them, in such a manner as to 
bring your mind to bear on it, the 
other will be utterly excluded from 
your contemporary consciousness. How is 
it, then, with the whale? True, both 
his eyes, in themselves, must 
simultaneously act; but is his brain so 
much more comprehensive, combining, and 
subtle than man’s, that he can at the 
same moment of time attentively examine 
two distinct prospects, one on one side 
of him, and the other in an exactly 
opposite direction? If he can, then is 
it as marvellous a thing in him, as if 
a man were able simultaneously to go 
through the demonstrations of two 
distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, 
strictly investigated, is there any 
incongruity in this comparison.

It may be but an idle whim, but it has 
always seemed to me, that the 
extraordinary vacillations of movement 
displayed by some whales when beset by 
three or four boats; the timidity and 
liability to queer frights, so common 
to such whales; I think that all this 
indirectly proceeds from the helpless 
perplexity of volition, in which their 
divided and diametrically opposite 
powers of vision must involve them.

But the ear of the whale is full as 
curious as the eye. If you are an 
entire stranger to their race, you 
might hunt over these two heads for 
hours, and never discover that organ. 
The ear has no external leaf whatever; 
and into the hole itself you can hardly 
insert a quill, so wondrously minute is 
it. It is lodged a little behind the 
eye. With respect to their ears, this 
important difference is to be observed 
between the sperm whale and the right. 
While the ear of the former has an 
external opening, that of the latter is 
entirely and evenly covered over with a 
membrane, so as to be quite 
imperceptible from without.

Is it not curious, that so vast a being 
as the whale should see the world 
through so small an eye, and hear the 
thunder through an ear which is smaller 
than a hare’s? But if his eyes were 
broad as the lens of Herschel’s great 
telescope; and his ears capacious as 
the porches of cathedrals; would that 
make him any longer of sight, or 
sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why 
then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? 
Subtilize it.

Let us now with whatever levers and 
steam-engines we have at hand, cant 
over the sperm whale’s head, that it 
may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a 
ladder to the summit, have a peep down 
the mouth; and were it not that the 
body is now completely separated from 
it, with a lantern we might descend 
into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of 
his stomach. But let us hold on here by 
this tooth, and look about us where we 
are. What a really beautiful and 
chaste-looking mouth! from floor to 
ceiling, lined, or rather papered with 
a glistening white membrane, glossy as 
bridal satins.

But come out now, and look at this 
portentous lower jaw, which seems like 
the long narrow lid of an immense 
snuff-box, with 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. This whale is not 
dead; he is only dispirited; out of 
sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so 
supine, that the hinges of his jaw have 
relaxed, leaving him there in that 
ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to 
all his tribe, who must, no doubt, 
imprecate lock-jaws upon him.

In most cases this lower jaw—being 
easily unhinged by a practised 
artist—is disengaged and hoisted on 
deck for the purpose of extracting the 
ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of 
that hard white whalebone with which 
the fishermen fashion all sorts of 
curious articles, including canes, 
umbrella-stocks, and handles to 
riding-whips.

With a long, weary hoist the jaw is 
dragged on board, as if it were an 
anchor; and when the proper time 
comes—some few days after the other 
work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, 
being all accomplished dentists, are 
set to drawing teeth. With a keen 
cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the 
gums; then the jaw is lashed down to 
ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged 
from aloft, they drag out these teeth, 
as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old 
oaks out of wild wood lands. There are 
generally forty-two teeth in all; in 
old whales, much worn down, but 
undecayed; nor filled after our 
artificial fashion. The jaw is 
afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled 
away like joists for building houses. 

 

CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s 
Head—Contrasted View.

Crossing the deck, let us now have a 
good long look at the Right Whale’s 
head.

As in general shape the noble Sperm 
Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman 
war-chariot (especially in front, where 
it is so broadly rounded); so, at a 
broad view, the Right Whale’s head 
bears a rather inelegant resemblance to 
a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two 
hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager 
likened its shape to that of a 
shoemaker’s last. And in this same last 
or shoe, that old woman of the nursery 
tale, with the swarming brood, might 
very comfortably be lodged, she and all 
her progeny.

But 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. At any rate, when you watch 
those live crabs that nestle here on 
this bonnet, such an idea will be 
almost sure to occur to you; unless, 
indeed, your fancy has been fixed by 
the technical term “crown” also 
bestowed upon it; in which case you 
will take great interest in thinking 
how this mighty monster is actually a 
diademed king of the sea, whose green 
crown has been put together for him in 
this marvellous manner. But if this 
whale be a king, he is a very sulky 
looking fellow to grace a diadem. 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.

A great pity, now, that this 
unfortunate whale should be 
hare-lipped. The fissure is about a 
foot across. Probably the mother during 
an important interval was sailing down 
the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes 
caused the beach to gape. Over this 
lip, as over a slippery threshold, we 
now slide into the mouth. Upon my word 
were I at Mackinaw, I should take this 
to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. 
Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah 
went? The roof is about twelve feet 
high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, 
as if there were a regular ridge-pole 
there; while these ribbed, arched, 
hairy sides, present us with those 
wondrous, half vertical, 
scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say 
three hundred on a side, which 
depending from the upper part of the 
head or crown bone, form those Venetian 
blinds which have elsewhere been 
cursorily mentioned. The edges of these 
bones are fringed with hairy fibres, 
through which the Right Whale strains 
the water, and in whose intricacies he 
retains the small fish, when 
openmouthed he goes through the seas of 
brit in feeding time. In the central 
blinds of bone, as they stand in their 
natural order, there are certain 
curious marks, curves, hollows, and 
ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate 
the creature’s age, as the age of an 
oak by its circular rings. Though the 
certainty of this criterion is far from 
demonstrable, yet it has the savor of 
analogical probability. At any rate, if 
we yield to it, we must grant a far 
greater age to the Right Whale than at 
first glance will seem reasonable.

In old times, there seem to have 
prevailed the most curious fancies 
concerning these blinds. One voyager in 
Purchas calls them the wondrous 
“whiskers” inside of the whale’s 
mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a 
third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses 
the following elegant language: “There 
are about two hundred and fifty fins 
growing on each side of his upper chop, 
which arch over his tongue on each side 
of his mouth.”

*This reminds us that the Right Whale 
really has a sort of whisker, or rather 
a moustache, consisting of a few 
scattered white hairs on the upper part 
of the outer end of the lower jaw. 
Sometimes these tufts impart a rather 
brigandish expression to his otherwise 
solemn countenance.

As every one knows, these same “hogs’ 
bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,” 
“blinds,” or whatever you please, 
furnish to the ladies their busks and 
other stiffening contrivances. But in 
this particular, the demand has long 
been on the decline. It was in Queen 
Anne’s time that the bone was in its 
glory, the farthingale being then all 
the fashion. And as those ancient dames 
moved about gaily, though in the jaws 
of the whale, as you may say; even so, 
in a shower, with the like 
thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly 
under the same jaws for protection; the 
umbrella being a tent spread over the 
same bone.

But now forget all about blinds and 
whiskers for a moment, and, standing in 
the Right Whale’s mouth, look around 
you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades 
of bone so methodically ranged about, 
would you not think you were inside of 
the great Haarlem organ, and gazing 
upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet 
to the organ we have a rug of the 
softest Turkey—the tongue, which is 
glued, as it were, to the floor of the 
mouth. It is very fat and tender, and 
apt to tear in pieces in hoisting it on 
deck. This particular tongue now before 
us; at a passing glance I should say it 
was a six-barreler; that is, it will 
yield you about that amount of oil.

Ere this, you must have plainly seen 
the truth of what I started with—that 
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.

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.

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 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. 

 

CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.

Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm 
Whale’s head, I would have you, as a 
sensible physiologist, 
simply—particularly 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 
man 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 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. But supplementary to 
this, it has hypothetically occurred to 
me, that as ordinary fish possess what 
is called a swimming bladder in them, 
capable, at will, of distension or 
contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as 
far as I know, has no such provision in 
him; considering, too, the otherwise 
inexplicable manner in which he now 
depresses his head altogether beneath 
the surface, and anon swims with it 
high elevated out of the water; 
considering the unobstructed elasticity 
of its envelope; considering the unique 
interior of his head; it has 
hypothetically occurred to me, I say, 
that those mystical lung-celled 
honeycombs there may possibly have some 
hitherto unknown and unsuspected 
connexion with the outer air, so as to 
be susceptible to atmospheric 
distension and contraction. If this be 
so, fancy the irresistibleness of that 
might, to which the most impalpable and 
destructive of all elements contributes.

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. So that 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 eye-brow. 
For unless you own the whale, you are 
but a provincial and sentimentalist in 
Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for 
salamander giants only to encounter; 
how small the chances for the 
provincials then? What befell the 
weakling youth lifting the dread 
goddess’s veil at Lais? 

 

CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.

Now comes the Baling 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,* 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.

*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 up 
and down 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. 

 

CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.

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 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, that wild Indian, 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, without stating his 
particular reasons; 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.

At this instant, while Daggoo, on the 
summit of the head, 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; the negro 
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.

“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 
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 too 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, 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 79. The Prairie.

To scan the lines of his face, or feel 
the bumps on the head of this 
Leviathan; this is a thing which no 
Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as 
yet undertaken. Such an enterprise 
would seem almost as hopeful as for 
Lavater to have scrutinized the 
wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or 
for Gall to have mounted a ladder and 
manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon. 
Still, in that famous work of his, 
Lavater not only treats of the various 
faces of men, but also attentively 
studies the faces of horses, birds, 
serpents, and fish; and dwells in 
detail upon the modifications of 
expression discernible therein. Nor 
have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim 
failed to throw out some hints touching 
the phrenological characteristics of 
other beings than man. Therefore, 
though I am but ill qualified for a 
pioneer, in the application of these 
two semi-sciences to the whale, I will 
do my endeavor. I try all things; I 
achieve what I can.

Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm 
Whale is an anomalous creature. He has 
no proper nose. And since the nose is 
the central and most conspicuous of the 
features; and since it perhaps most 
modifies and finally controls their 
combined expression; hence it would 
seem that its entire absence, as an 
external appendage, must very largely 
affect the countenance of the whale. 
For as in landscape gardening, a spire, 
cupola, monument, or tower of some 
sort, is deemed almost indispensable to 
the completion of the scene; so no face 
can be physiognomically in keeping 
without the elevated open-work belfry 
of the nose. Dash the nose from 
Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a sorry 
remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is 
of so mighty a magnitude, all his 
proportions are so stately, that the 
same deficiency which in the sculptured 
Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish 
at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A 
nose to the whale would have been 
impertinent. As on your physiognomical 
voyage you sail round his vast head in 
your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions 
of him are never insulted by the 
reflection that he has a nose to be 
pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so 
often will insist upon obtruding even 
when beholding the mightiest royal 
beadle on his throne.

In some particulars, perhaps the most 
imposing physiognomical view to be had 
of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full 
front of his head. This aspect is 
sublime.

In thought, a fine human brow is like 
the East when troubled with the 
morning. In the repose of the pasture, 
the curled brow of the bull has a touch 
of the grand in it. Pushing heavy 
cannon up mountain defiles, the 
elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or 
animal, the mystical brow is as that 
great golden seal affixed by the German 
Emperors to their decrees. It 
signifies—“God: done this day by my 
hand.” But in most creatures, nay in 
man himself, very often the brow is but 
a mere strip of alpine land lying along 
the snow line. Few are the foreheads 
which like Shakespeare’s or 
Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend 
so low, that the eyes themselves seem 
clear, eternal, tideless mountain 
lakes; and all above them in the 
forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track 
the antlered thoughts descending there 
to drink, as the Highland hunters track 
the snow prints of the deer. But in the 
great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty 
god-like dignity inherent in the brow 
is so immensely amplified, that gazing 
on it, in that full front view, you 
feel the Deity and the dread powers 
more forcibly than in beholding any 
other object in living nature. For you 
see no one point precisely; not one 
distinct feature is revealed; no nose, 
eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has 
none, proper; nothing but that one 
broad firmament of a forehead, pleated 
with riddles; dumbly lowering with the 
doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, 
in profile, does this wondrous brow 
diminish; though that way viewed its 
grandeur does not domineer upon you so. 
In profile, you plainly perceive that 
horizontal, semi-crescentic depression 
in the forehead’s middle, which, in 
man, is Lavater’s mark of genius.

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has 
the Sperm Whale ever written a book, 
spoken a speech? No, his great genius 
is declared in his doing nothing 
particular to prove it. It is moreover 
declared in his pyramidical silence. 
And this reminds me that had the great 
Sperm Whale been known to the young 
Orient World, he would have been 
deified by their child-magian thoughts. 
They deified the crocodile of the Nile, 
because the crocodile is tongueless; 
and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or 
at least it is so exceedingly small, as 
to be incapable of protrusion. If 
hereafter any highly cultured, poetical 
nation shall lure back to their 
birth-right, the merry May-day gods of 
old; and livingly enthrone them again 
in the now egotistical sky; in the now 
unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted 
to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm 
Whale shall lord it.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled 
granite hieroglyphics. But there is no 
Champollion to decipher the Egypt of 
every man’s and every being’s face. 
Physiognomy, like every other human 
science, is but a passing fable. If 
then, Sir William Jones, who read in 
thirty languages, could not read the 
simplest peasant’s face in its 
profounder and more subtle meanings, 
how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read 
the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s 
brow? I but put that brow before you. 
Read it if you can. 

 

CHAPTER 80. The Nut.

If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically 
a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain 
seems that geometrical circle which it 
is impossible to square.

In the full-grown creature the skull 
will measure at least twenty feet in 
length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the 
side view of this skull is as the side 
of a moderately inclined plane resting 
throughout on a level base. But in 
life—as we have elsewhere seen—this 
inclined plane is angularly filled up, 
and almost squared by the enormous 
superincumbent mass of the junk and 
sperm. At the high end the skull forms 
a crater to bed that part of the mass; 
while under the long floor of this 
crater—in another cavity seldom 
exceeding ten inches in length and as 
many in depth—reposes the mere handful 
of this monster’s brain. The brain is 
at least twenty feet from his apparent 
forehead in life; it is hidden away 
behind its vast outworks, like the 
innermost citadel within the amplified 
fortifications of Quebec. So like a 
choice casket is it secreted in him, 
that I have known some whalemen who 
peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale 
has any other brain than that palpable 
semblance of one formed by the 
cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. 
Lying in strange folds, courses, and 
convolutions, to their apprehensions, 
it seems more in keeping with the idea 
of his general might to regard that 
mystic part of him as the seat of his 
intelligence.

It is plain, then, that phrenologically 
the head of this Leviathan, in the 
creature’s living intact state, is an 
entire delusion. As for his true brain, 
you can then see no indications of it, 
nor feel any. The whale, like all 
things that are mighty, wears a false 
brow to the common world.

If you unload his skull of its spermy 
heaps and then take a rear view of its 
rear end, which is the high end, you 
will be struck by its resemblance to 
the human skull, beheld in the same 
situation, and from the same point of 
view. Indeed, place this reversed skull 
(scaled down to the human magnitude) 
among a plate of men’s skulls, and you 
would involuntarily confound it with 
them; and remarking the depressions on 
one part of its summit, in 
phrenological phrase you would say—This 
man had no self-esteem, and no 
veneration. And by those negations, 
considered along with the affirmative 
fact of his prodigious bulk and power, 
you can best form to yourself the 
truest, though not the most 
exhilarating conception of what the 
most exalted potency is.

But if from the comparative dimensions 
of the whale’s proper brain, you deem 
it incapable of being adequately 
charted, then I have another idea for 
you. If you attentively regard almost 
any quadruped’s spine, you will be 
struck with the resemblance of its 
vertebrae to a strung necklace of 
dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental 
resemblance to the skull proper. It is 
a German conceit, that the vertebrae 
are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But 
the curious external resemblance, I 
take it the Germans were not the first 
men to perceive. A foreign friend once 
pointed it out to me, in the skeleton 
of a foe he had slain, and with the 
vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in 
a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked 
prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that 
the phrenologists have omitted an 
important thing in not pushing their 
investigations from the cerebellum 
through the spinal canal. For I believe 
that much of a man’s character will be 
found betokened in his backbone. I 
would rather feel your spine than your 
skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of 
a spine never yet upheld a full and 
noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as 
in the firm audacious staff of that 
flag which I fling half out to the 
world.

Apply this spinal branch of phrenology 
to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity 
is continuous with the first 
neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the 
bottom of the spinal canal will measure 
ten inches across, being eight in 
height, and of a triangular figure with 
the base downwards. As it passes 
through the remaining vertebrae the 
canal tapers in size, but for a 
considerable distance remains of large 
capacity. Now, of course, this canal is 
filled with much the same strangely 
fibrous substance—the spinal cord—as 
the brain; and directly communicates 
with the brain. And what is still more, 
for many feet after emerging from the 
brain’s cavity, the spinal cord remains 
of an undecreasing girth, almost equal 
to that of the brain. Under all these 
circumstances, would it be unreasonable 
to survey and map out the whale’s spine 
phrenologically? For, viewed in this 
light, the wonderful comparative 
smallness of his brain proper is more 
than compensated by the wonderful 
comparative magnitude of his spinal 
cord.

But leaving this hint to operate as it 
may with the phrenologists, I would 
merely assume the spinal theory for a 
moment, in reference to the Sperm 
Whale’s hump. This august hump, if I 
mistake not, rises over one of the 
larger vertebrae, and is, therefore, in 
some sort, the outer convex mould of 
it. From its relative situation then, I 
should call this high hump the organ of 
firmness or indomitableness in the 
Sperm Whale. And that the great monster 
is indomitable, you will yet have 
reason to know. 

 

CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.

The predestinated day arrived, and we 
duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De 
Deer, master, of Bremen.

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

For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed 
quite eager to pay her respects. While 
yet some distance from the Pequod, she 
rounded to, and dropping a boat, her 
captain was impelled towards us, 
impatiently standing in the bows 
instead of the stern.

“What has he in his hand there?” cried 
Starbuck, pointing to something 
wavingly held by the German. 
“Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!”

“Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a 
coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s coming 
off to make us our coffee, is the 
Yarman; don’t you see that big tin can 
there alongside of him?—that’s his 
boiling water. Oh! he’s all right, is 
the Yarman.”

“Go along with you,” cried Flask, “it’s 
a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He’s out 
of oil, and has come a-begging.”

However curious it may seem for an 
oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the 
whale-ground, and however much it may 
invertedly contradict the old proverb 
about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet 
sometimes such a thing really happens; 
and in the present case Captain Derick 
De Deer did indubitably conduct a 
lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.

As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly 
accosted him, without at all heeding 
what he had in his hand; but in his 
broken lingo, the German soon evinced 
his complete ignorance of the White 
Whale; immediately turning the 
conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil 
can, with some remarks touching his 
having to turn into his hammock at 
night in profound darkness—his last 
drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not 
a single flying-fish yet captured to 
supply the deficiency; concluding by 
hinting that his ship was indeed what 
in the Fishery is technically called a 
clean one (that is, an empty one), well 
deserving the name of Jungfrau or the 
Virgin.

His necessities supplied, Derick 
departed; but he had not gained his 
ship’s side, when whales were almost 
simultaneously raised from the 
mast-heads of both vessels; and so 
eager for the chase was Derick, that 
without pausing to put his oil-can and 
lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round his 
boat and made after the leviathan 
lamp-feeders.

Now, the game having risen to leeward, 
he and the other three German boats 
that soon followed him, had 
considerably the start of the Pequod’s 
keels. There were eight whales, an 
average pod. Aware of their danger, 
they were going all abreast with great 
speed straight before the wind, rubbing 
their flanks as closely as so many 
spans of horses in harness. They left a 
great, wide wake, as though continually 
unrolling a great wide parchment upon 
the sea.

Full in this rapid wake, and many 
fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, 
humped old bull, which by his 
comparatively slow progress, as well as 
by the unusual yellowish incrustations 
overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with 
the jaundice, or some other infirmity. 
Whether this whale belonged to the pod 
in advance, seemed questionable; for it 
is not customary for such venerable 
leviathans to be at all social. 
Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, 
though indeed their back water must 
have retarded him, because the 
white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle 
was a dashed one, like the swell formed 
when two hostile currents meet. His 
spout was short, slow, and laborious; 
coming forth with a choking sort of 
gush, and spending itself in torn 
shreds, followed by strange 
subterranean commotions in him, which 
seemed to have egress at his other 
buried extremity, causing the waters 
behind him to upbubble.

“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, 
“he has the stomach-ache, I’m afraid. 
Lord, think of having half an acre of 
stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding 
mad Christmas in him, boys. It’s the 
first foul wind I ever knew to blow 
from astern; but look, did ever whale 
yaw so before? it must be, he’s lost 
his tiller.”

As an overladen Indiaman bearing down 
the Hindostan coast with a deck load of 
frightened horses, careens, buries, 
rolls, and wallows on her way; so did 
this old whale heave his aged bulk, and 
now and then partly turning over on his 
cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of 
his devious wake in the unnatural stump 
of his starboard fin. Whether he had 
lost that fin in battle, or had been 
born without it, it were hard to say.

“Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll 
give ye a sling for that wounded arm,” 
cried cruel Flask, pointing to the 
whale-line near him.

“Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” 
cried Starbuck. “Give way, or the 
German will have him.”

With one intent all the combined rival 
boats were pointed for this one fish, 
because not only was he the largest, 
and therefore the most valuable whale, 
but he was nearest to them, and the 
other whales were going with such great 
velocity, moreover, as almost to defy 
pursuit for the time. At this juncture 
the Pequod’s keels had shot by the 
three German boats last lowered; but 
from the great start he had had, 
Derick’s boat still led the chase, 
though every moment neared by his 
foreign rivals. The only thing they 
feared, was, that from being already so 
nigh to his mark, he would be enabled 
to dart his iron before they could 
completely overtake and pass him. As 
for Derick, he seemed quite confident 
that this would be the case, and 
occasionally with a deriding gesture 
shook his lamp-feeder at the other 
boats.

“The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” 
cried Starbuck; “he mocks and dares me 
with the very poor-box I filled for him 
not five minutes ago!”—then in his old 
intense whisper—“Give way, greyhounds! 
Dog to it!”

“I tell ye what it is, men”—cried Stubb 
to his crew—“it’s against my religion 
to get mad; but I’d like to eat that 
villainous Yarman—Pull—won’t ye? Are ye 
going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye 
love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, 
then, to the best man. Come, why don’t 
some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who’s 
that been dropping an anchor 
overboard—we don’t budge an inch—we’re 
becalmed. Halloo, here’s grass growing 
in the boat’s bottom—and by the Lord, 
the mast there’s budding. This won’t 
do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The 
short and long of it is, men, will ye 
spit fire or not?”

“Oh! see the suds he makes!” cried 
Flask, dancing up and down—“What a 
hump—Oh, do pile on the beef—lays like 
a log! Oh! my lads, do 
spring—slap-jacks and quahogs for 
supper, you know, my lads—baked clams 
and muffins—oh, do, do, spring,—he’s a 
hundred barreller—don’t lose him 
now—don’t oh, don’t!—see that 
Yarman—Oh, won’t ye pull for your duff, 
my lads—such a sog! such a sogger! 
Don’t ye love sperm? There goes three 
thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a whole 
bank! The bank of England!—Oh, do, do, 
do!—What’s that Yarman about now?”

At this moment Derick was in the act of 
pitching his lamp-feeder at the 
advancing boats, and also his oil-can; 
perhaps with the double view of 
retarding his rivals’ way, and at the 
same time economically accelerating his 
own by the momentary impetus of the 
backward toss.

“The unmannerly Dutch dogger!” cried 
Stubb. “Pull now, men, like fifty 
thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of 
red-haired devils. What d’ye say, 
Tashtego; are you the man to snap your 
spine in two-and-twenty pieces for the 
honour of old Gayhead? What d’ye say?”

“I say, pull like god-dam,”—cried the 
Indian.

Fiercely, but evenly incited by the 
taunts of the German, the Pequod’s 
three boats now began ranging almost 
abreast; and, so disposed, momentarily 
neared him. In that fine, loose, 
chivalrous attitude of the headsman 
when drawing near to his prey, the 
three mates stood up proudly, 
occasionally backing the after oarsman 
with an exhilarating cry of, “There she 
slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash 
breeze! Down with the Yarman! Sail over 
him!”

But so decided an original start had 
Derick had, that spite of all their 
gallantry, he would have proved the 
victor in this race, had not a 
righteous judgment descended upon him 
in a crab which caught the blade of his 
midship oarsman. While this clumsy 
lubber was striving to free his 
white-ash, and while, in consequence, 
Derick’s boat was nigh to capsizing, 
and he thundering away at his men in a 
mighty rage;—that was a good time for 
Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a 
shout, they took a mortal start 
forwards, and slantingly ranged up on 
the German’s quarter. An instant more, 
and all four boats were diagonically in 
the whale’s immediate wake, while 
stretching from them, on both sides, 
was the foaming swell that he made.

It was a terrific, most pitiable, and 
maddening sight. The whale was now 
going head out, and sending his spout 
before him in a continual tormented 
jet; while his one poor fin beat his 
side in an agony of fright. Now to this 
hand, now to that, he yawed in his 
faltering flight, and still at every 
billow that he broke, he spasmodically 
sank in the sea, or sideways rolled 
towards the sky his one beating fin. So 
have I seen a bird with clipped wing 
making affrighted broken circles in the 
air, vainly striving to escape the 
piratical hawks. But the bird has a 
voice, and with plaintive cries will 
make known her fear; but the fear of 
this vast dumb brute of the sea, was 
chained up and enchanted in him; he had 
no voice, save that choking respiration 
through his spiracle, and this made the 
sight of him unspeakably pitiable; 
while still, in his amazing bulk, 
portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, 
there was enough to appal the stoutest 
man who so pitied.

Seeing now that but a very few moments 
more would give the Pequod’s boats the 
advantage, and rather than be thus 
foiled of his game, Derick chose to 
hazard what to him must have seemed a 
most unusually long dart, ere the last 
chance would for ever escape.

But no sooner did his harpooneer stand 
up for the stroke, than all three 
tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego, 
Daggoo—instinctively sprang to their 
feet, and standing in a diagonal row, 
simultaneously pointed their barbs; and 
darted over the head of the German 
harpooneer, their three Nantucket irons 
entered the whale. Blinding vapours of 
foam and white-fire! The three boats, 
in the first fury of the whale’s 
headlong rush, bumped the German’s 
aside with such force, that both Derick 
and his baffled harpooneer were spilled 
out, and sailed over by the three 
flying keels.

“Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” 
cried Stubb, casting a passing glance 
upon them as he shot by; “ye’ll be 
picked up presently—all right—I saw 
some sharks astern—St. Bernard’s dogs, 
you know—relieve distressed travellers. 
Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. 
Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah!—Here we 
go like three tin kettles at the tail 
of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind 
of fastening to an elephant in a 
tilbury on a plain—makes the 
wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten 
to him that way; and there’s danger of 
being pitched out too, when you strike 
a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a 
fellow feels when he’s going to Davy 
Jones—all a rush down an endless 
inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale 
carries the everlasting mail!”

But the monster’s run was a brief one. 
Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously 
sounded. With a grating rush, the three 
lines flew round the loggerheads with 
such a force as to gouge deep grooves 
in them; while so fearful were the 
harpooneers that this rapid sounding 
would soon exhaust the lines, that 
using all their dexterous might, they 
caught repeated smoking turns with the 
rope to hold on; till at last—owing to 
the perpendicular strain from the 
lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence 
the three ropes went straight down into 
the blue—the gunwales of the bows were 
almost even with the water, while the 
three sterns tilted high in the air. 
And the whale soon ceasing to sound, 
for some time they remained in that 
attitude, fearful of expending more 
line, though the position was a little 
ticklish. But though boats have been 
taken down and lost in this way, yet it 
is this “holding on,” as it is called; 
this hooking up by the sharp barbs of 
his live flesh from the back; this it 
is that often torments the Leviathan 
into soon rising again to meet the 
sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to 
speak of the peril of the thing, it is 
to be doubted whether this course is 
always the best; for it is but 
reasonable to presume, that the longer 
the stricken whale stays under water, 
the more he is exhausted. Because, 
owing to the enormous surface of him—in 
a full grown sperm whale something less 
than 2000 square feet—the pressure of 
the water is immense. We all know what 
an astonishing atmospheric weight we 
ourselves stand up under; even here, 
above-ground, in the air; how vast, 
then, the burden of a whale, bearing on 
his back a column of two hundred 
fathoms of ocean! It must at least 
equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. 
One whaleman has estimated it at the 
weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, 
with all their guns, and stores, and 
men on board.

As the three boats lay there on that 
gently rolling sea, gazing down into 
its eternal blue noon; and as not a 
single groan or cry of any sort, nay, 
not so much as a ripple or a bubble 
came up from its depths; what landsman 
would have thought, that beneath all 
that silence and placidity, the utmost 
monster of the seas was writhing and 
wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of 
perpendicular rope were visible at the 
bows. Seems it credible that by three 
such thin threads the great Leviathan 
was suspended like the big weight to an 
eight day clock. Suspended? and to 
what? To three bits of board. Is this 
the creature of whom it was once so 
triumphantly said—“Canst thou fill his 
skin with barbed irons? or his head 
with fish-spears? The sword of him that 
layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, 
the dart, nor the habergeon: he 
esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow 
cannot make him flee; darts are counted 
as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking 
of a spear!” This the creature? this 
he? Oh! that unfulfilments should 
follow the prophets. For with the 
strength of a thousand thighs in his 
tail, Leviathan had run his head under 
the mountains of the sea, to hide him 
from the Pequod’s fish-spears!

In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the 
shadows that the three boats sent down 
beneath the surface, must have been 
long enough and broad enough to shade 
half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how 
appalling to the wounded whale must 
have been such huge phantoms flitting 
over his head!

“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried 
Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly 
vibrated in the water, distinctly 
conducting upwards to them, as by 
magnetic wires, the life and death 
throbs of the whale, so that every 
oarsman felt them in his seat. The next 
moment, relieved in great part from the 
downward strain at the bows, the boats 
gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a 
small icefield will, when a dense herd 
of white bears are scared from it into 
the sea.

“Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck 
again; “he’s rising.”

The lines, of which, hardly an instant 
before, not one hand’s breadth could 
have been gained, were now in long 
quick coils flung back all dripping 
into the boats, and soon the whale 
broke water within two ship’s lengths 
of the hunters.

His motions plainly denoted his extreme 
exhaustion. In most land animals there 
are certain valves or flood-gates in 
many of their veins, whereby when 
wounded, the blood is in some degree at 
least instantly shut off in certain 
directions. Not so with the whale; one 
of whose peculiarities it is to have an 
entire non-valvular structure of the 
blood-vessels, so that when pierced 
even by so small a point as a harpoon, 
a deadly drain is at once begun upon 
his whole arterial system; and when 
this is heightened by the extraordinary 
pressure of water at a great distance 
below the surface, his life may be said 
to pour from him in incessant streams. 
Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in 
him, and so distant and numerous its 
interior fountains, that he will keep 
thus bleeding and bleeding for a 
considerable period; even as in a 
drought a river will flow, whose source 
is in the well-springs of far-off and 
undiscernible hills. Even now, when the 
boats pulled upon this whale, and 
perilously drew over his swaying 
flukes, and the lances were darted into 
him, they were followed by steady jets 
from the new made wound, which kept 
continually playing, while the natural 
spout-hole in his head was only at 
intervals, however rapid, sending its 
affrighted moisture into the air. From 
this last vent no blood yet came, 
because no vital part of him had thus 
far been struck. His life, as they 
significantly call it, was untouched.

As the boats now more closely 
surrounded him, the whole upper part of 
his form, with much of it that is 
ordinarily submerged, was plainly 
revealed. His eyes, or rather the 
places where his eyes had been, were 
beheld. As strange misgrown masses 
gather in the knot-holes of the noblest 
oaks when prostrate, so from the points 
which the whale’s eyes had once 
occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, 
horribly pitiable to see. But pity 
there was none. For all his old age, 
and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he 
must die the death and be murdered, in 
order to light the gay bridals and 
other merry-makings of men, and also to 
illuminate the solemn churches that 
preach unconditional inoffensiveness by 
all to all. Still rolling in his blood, 
at last he partially disclosed a 
strangely discoloured bunch or 
protuberance, the size of a bushel, low 
down on the flank.

“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let 
me prick him there once.”

“Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no 
need of that!”

But humane Starbuck was too late. At 
the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet 
shot from this cruel wound, and goaded 
by it into more than sufferable 
anguish, the whale now spouting thick 
blood, with swift fury blindly darted 
at the craft, bespattering them and 
their glorying crews all over with 
showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat 
and marring the bows. It was his death 
stroke. For, by this time, so spent was 
he by loss of blood, that he helplessly 
rolled away from the wreck he had made; 
lay panting on his side, impotently 
flapped with his stumped fin, then over 
and over slowly revolved like a waning 
world; turned up the white secrets of 
his belly; lay like a log, and died. It 
was most piteous, that last expiring 
spout. As when by unseen hands the 
water is gradually drawn off from some 
mighty fountain, and with half-stifled 
melancholy gurglings the spray-column 
lowers and lowers to the ground—so the 
last long dying spout of the whale.

Soon, while the crews were awaiting the 
arrival of the ship, the body showed 
symptoms of sinking with all its 
treasures unrifled. Immediately, by 
Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured 
to it at different points, so that ere 
long every boat was a buoy; the sunken 
whale being suspended a few inches 
beneath them by the cords. By very 
heedful management, when the ship drew 
nigh, the whale was transferred to her 
side, and was strongly secured there by 
the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was 
plain that unless artificially upheld, 
the body would at once sink to the 
bottom.

It so chanced that almost upon first 
cutting into him with the spade, the 
entire length of a corroded harpoon was 
found imbedded in his flesh, on the 
lower part of the bunch before 
described. But as the stumps of 
harpoons are frequently found in the 
dead bodies of captured whales, with 
the flesh perfectly healed around them, 
and no prominence of any kind to denote 
their place; therefore, there must 
needs have been some other unknown 
reason in the present case fully to 
account for the ulceration alluded to. 
But still more curious was the fact of 
a lance-head of stone being found in 
him, not far from the buried iron, the 
flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had 
darted that stone lance? And when? It 
might have been darted by some Nor’ 
West Indian long before America was 
discovered.

What other marvels might have been 
rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet 
there is no telling. But a sudden stop 
was put to further discoveries, by the 
ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged 
over sideways to the sea, owing to the 
body’s immensely increasing tendency to 
sink. However, Starbuck, who had the 
ordering of affairs, hung on to it to 
the last; hung on to it so resolutely, 
indeed, that when at length the ship 
would have been capsized, if still 
persisting in locking arms with the 
body; then, when the command was given 
to break clear from it, such was the 
immovable strain upon the timber-heads 
to which the fluke-chains and cables 
were fastened, that it was impossible 
to cast them off. Meantime everything 
in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to 
the other side of the deck was like 
walking up the steep gabled roof of a 
house. The ship groaned and gasped. 
Many of the ivory inlayings of her 
bulwarks and cabins were started from 
their places, by the unnatural 
dislocation. In vain handspikes and 
crows were brought to bear upon the 
immovable fluke-chains, to pry them 
adrift from the timberheads; and so low 
had the whale now settled that the 
submerged ends could not be at all 
approached, while every moment whole 
tons of ponderosity seemed added to the 
sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on 
the point of going over.

“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried 
Stubb to the body, “don’t be in such a 
devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, 
men, we must do something or go for it. 
No use prying there; avast, I say with 
your handspikes, and run one of ye for 
a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut 
the big chains.”

“Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and 
seizing the carpenter’s heavy hatchet, 
he leaned out of a porthole, and steel 
to iron, began slashing at the largest 
fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full 
of sparks, were given, when the 
exceeding strain effected the rest. 
With a terrific snap, every fastening 
went adrift; the ship righted, the 
carcase sank.

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking 
of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a 
very curious thing; nor has any 
fisherman yet adequately accounted for 
it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats 
with great buoyancy, with its side or 
belly considerably elevated above the 
surface. If the only whales that thus 
sank were old, meagre, and 
broken-hearted creatures, their pads of 
lard diminished and all their bones 
heavy and rheumatic; then you might 
with some reason assert that this 
sinking is caused by an uncommon 
specific gravity in the fish so 
sinking, consequent upon this absence 
of buoyant matter in him. But it is not 
so. For young whales, in the highest 
health, and swelling with noble 
aspirations, prematurely cut off in the 
warm flush and May of life, with all 
their panting lard about them; even 
these brawny, buoyant heroes do 
sometimes sink.

Be it said, however, that the Sperm 
Whale is far less liable to this 
accident than any other species. Where 
one of that sort go down, twenty Right 
Whales do. This difference in the 
species is no doubt imputable in no 
small degree to the greater quantity of 
bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian 
blinds alone sometimes weighing more 
than a ton; from this incumbrance the 
Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there 
are instances where, after the lapse of 
many hours or several days, the sunken 
whale again rises, more buoyant than in 
life. But the reason of this is 
obvious. Gases are generated in him; he 
swells to a prodigious magnitude; 
becomes a sort of animal balloon. A 
line-of-battle ship could hardly keep 
him under then. In the Shore Whaling, 
on soundings, among the Bays of New 
Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token 
of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, 
with plenty of rope; so that when the 
body has gone down, they know where to 
look for it when it shall have ascended 
again.

It was not long after the sinking of 
the body that a cry was heard from the 
Pequod’s mast-heads, announcing that 
the Jungfrau was again lowering her 
boats; though the only spout in sight 
was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to 
the species of uncapturable whales, 
because of its incredible power of 
swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s 
spout is so similar to the Sperm 
Whale’s, that by unskilful fishermen it 
is often mistaken for it. And 
consequently Derick and all his host 
were now in valiant chase of this 
unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding 
all sail, made after her four young 
keels, and thus they all disappeared 
far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful 
chase.

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

 

CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of 
Whaling.

There are some enterprises in which a 
careful disorderliness is the true 
method.

The more I dive into this matter of 
whaling, and push my researches up to 
the very spring-head of it so much the 
more am I impressed with its great 
honourableness and antiquity; and 
especially when I find so many great 
demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all 
sorts, who one way or other have shed 
distinction upon it, I am transported 
with the reflection that I myself 
belong, though but subordinately, to so 
emblazoned a fraternity.

The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, 
was the first whaleman; and to the 
eternal honour of our calling be it 
said, that the first whale attacked by 
our brotherhood was not killed with any 
sordid intent. Those were the knightly 
days of our profession, when we only 
bore arms to succor the distressed, and 
not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. 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 sea-coast, and as Leviathan 
was in the very act of carrying her 
off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, 
intrepidly advancing, harpooned the 
monster, and delivered and married the 
maid. It was an admirable artistic 
exploit, rarely achieved by the best 
harpooneers of the present day; 
inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at 
the very first dart. And let no man 
doubt this Arkite story; for in the 
ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian 
coast, in one of the Pagan temples, 
there stood for many ages the vast 
skeleton of a whale, which the city’s 
legends and all the inhabitants 
asserted to be the identical bones of 
the monster that Perseus slew. When the 
Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton 
was carried to Italy in triumph. What 
seems most singular and suggestively 
important in this story, is this: it 
was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and 
Andromeda—indeed, by some supposed to 
be indirectly derived from it—is that 
famous story of St. George and the 
Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have 
been a whale; for in many old 
chronicles whales and dragons are 
strangely jumbled together, and often 
stand for each other. “Thou art as a 
lion of the waters, and as a dragon of 
the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, 
plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some 
versions of the Bible use that word 
itself. Besides, it would much subtract 
from the glory of the exploit had St. 
George but encountered a crawling 
reptile of the land, instead of doing 
battle with the great monster of the 
deep. Any man may kill a snake, but 
only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, 
have the heart in them to march boldly 
up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this 
scene mislead us; for though the 
creature encountered by that valiant 
whaleman of old is vaguely represented 
of a griffin-like shape, and though the 
battle is depicted on land and the 
saint on horseback, yet considering the 
great ignorance of those times, when 
the true form of the whale was unknown 
to artists; and considering that as in 
Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might 
have crawled up out of the sea on the 
beach; and considering that the animal 
ridden by St. George might have been 
only a large seal, or sea-horse; 
bearing all this in mind, it will not 
appear altogether incompatible with the 
sacred legend and the ancientest 
draughts of the scene, to hold this 
so-called dragon no other than the 
great Leviathan himself. In fact, 
placed before the strict and piercing 
truth, this whole story will fare like 
that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the 
Philistines, Dagon by name; who being 
planted before the ark of Israel, his 
horse’s head and both the palms of his 
hands fell off from him, and only the 
stump or fishy part of him remained. 
Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, 
even a whaleman, is the tutelary 
guardian of England; and by good 
rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket 
should be enrolled in the most noble 
order of St. George. And therefore, let 
not the knights of that honourable 
company (none of whom, I venture to 
say, have ever had to do with a whale 
like their great patron), let them 
never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, 
since even in our woollen frocks and 
tarred trowsers we are much better 
entitled to St. George’s decoration 
than they.

Whether to admit Hercules among us or 
not, concerning this I long remained 
dubious: for though according to the 
Greek mythologies, that antique 
Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny 
doer of rejoicing good deeds, was 
swallowed down and thrown up by a 
whale; still, whether that strictly 
makes a whaleman of him, that might be 
mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever 
actually harpooned his fish, unless, 
indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, 
he may be deemed a sort of involuntary 
whaleman; at any rate the whale caught 
him, if he did not the whale. I claim 
him for one of our clan.

But, by the best contradictory 
authorities, this Grecian story of 
Hercules and the whale is considered to 
be derived from the still more ancient 
Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; 
and vice versa; certainly they are very 
similar. If I claim the demigod then, 
why not the prophet?

Nor do 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 whale. 
When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith 
the Shaster, resolved to recreate the 
world after one of its periodical 
dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, 
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 a 
whaleman, then? even as a man who rides 
a horse is called a horseman?

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, 
and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for 
you! What club but the whaleman’s can 
head off like that? 

 

CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.

Reference was made to the historical 
story of Jonah and the whale in the 
preceding chapter. Now some 
Nantucketers rather distrust this 
historical story of Jonah and the 
whale. But then there were some 
sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, 
standing out from the orthodox pagans 
of their times, equally doubted the 
story of Hercules and the whale, and 
Arion and the dolphin; and yet their 
doubting those traditions did not make 
those traditions one whit the less 
facts, for all that.

One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief 
reason for questioning the Hebrew story 
was this:—He had one of those quaint 
old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with 
curious, unscientific plates; one of 
which represented Jonah’s whale with 
two spouts in his head—a peculiarity 
only true with respect to a species of 
the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the 
varieties of that order), concerning 
which the fishermen have this saying, 
“A penny roll would choke him”; his 
swallow is so very small. But, to this, 
Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is 
ready. It is not necessary, hints the 
Bishop, that we consider Jonah as 
tombed in the whale’s belly, but as 
temporarily lodged in some part of his 
mouth. And this seems reasonable enough 
in the good Bishop. For truly, the 
Right Whale’s mouth would accommodate a 
couple of whist-tables, and comfortably 
seat all the players. Possibly, too, 
Jonah might have ensconced himself in a 
hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, 
the Right Whale is toothless.

Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he 
went by that name) urged for his want 
of faith in this matter of the prophet, 
was something obscurely in reference to 
his incarcerated body and the whale’s 
gastric juices. But this objection 
likewise falls to the ground, because a 
German exegetist supposes that Jonah 
must have taken refuge in the floating 
body of a dead whale—even as the French 
soldiers in the Russian campaign turned 
their dead horses into tents, and 
crawled into them. Besides, it has been 
divined by other continental 
commentators, that when Jonah was 
thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, 
he straightway effected his escape to 
another vessel near by, some vessel 
with a whale for a figure-head; and, I 
would add, possibly called “The Whale,” 
as some craft are nowadays christened 
the “Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.” 
Nor have there been wanting learned 
exegetists who have opined that the 
whale mentioned in the book of Jonah 
merely meant a life-preserver—an 
inflated bag of wind—which the 
endangered prophet swam to, and so was 
saved from a watery doom. Poor 
Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted 
all round. But he had still another 
reason for his want of faith. It was 
this, if I remember right: Jonah was 
swallowed by the whale in the 
Mediterranean Sea, and after three days 
he was vomited up somewhere within 
three days’ journey of Nineveh, a city 
on the Tigris, very much more than 
three days’ journey across from the 
nearest point of the Mediterranean 
coast. How is that?

But was there no other way for the 
whale to land the prophet within that 
short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He 
might have carried him round by the way 
of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to 
speak of the passage through the whole 
length of the Mediterranean, and 
another passage up the Persian Gulf and 
Red Sea, such a supposition would 
involve the complete circumnavigation 
of all Africa in three days, not to 
speak of the Tigris waters, near the 
site of Nineveh, being too shallow for 
any whale to swim in. Besides, this 
idea of Jonah’s weathering the Cape of 
Good Hope at so early a day would wrest 
the honour of the discovery of that 
great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, 
its reputed discoverer, and so make 
modern history a liar.

But all these foolish arguments of old 
Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish 
pride of reason—a thing still more 
reprehensible in him, seeing that he 
had but little learning except what he 
had picked up from the sun and the sea. 
I say it only shows his foolish, 
impious pride, and abominable, devilish 
rebellion against the reverend clergy. 
For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, 
this very idea of Jonah’s going to 
Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was 
advanced as a signal magnification of 
the general miracle. And so it was. 
Besides, to this day, the highly 
enlightened Turks devoutly believe in 
the historical story of Jonah. And some 
three centuries ago, an English 
traveller in old Harris’s Voyages, 
speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in 
honour of Jonah, in which Mosque was a 
miraculous lamp that burnt without any 
oil. 

 

CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.

To make them run easily and swiftly, 
the axles of carriages are anointed; 
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 one morning not long 
after the German ship Jungfrau 
disappeared, took more than customary 
pains in that occupation; crawling 
under its bottom, where it hung over 
the side, and rubbing in the 
unctuousness as though diligently 
seeking to insure a crop of hair from 
the craft’s bald keel. 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; a disordered flight, as 
of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.

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. Small 
sword, or broad sword, in all its 
exercises boasts nothing like it. 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. Look at him; he stands 
upright in the tossed bow of the flying 
boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing 
whale is forty feet ahead. 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 minds 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. 

 

CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.

That for six thousand years—and no one 
knows how many millions of ages 
before—the great whales should have 
been spouting all over the sea, and 
sprinkling and mistifying the gardens 
of the deep, as with so many sprinkling 
or mistifying pots; and that for some 
centuries back, thousands of hunters 
should have been close by the fountain 
of the whale, watching these 
sprinklings and spoutings—that all this 
should be, and yet, that down to this 
blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter 
minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this 
sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), 
it should still remain a problem, 
whether these spoutings are, after all, 
really water, or nothing but 
vapour—this is surely a noteworthy 
thing.

Let us, then, look at this matter, 
along with some interesting items 
contingent. Every one knows that by the 
peculiar cunning of their gills, the 
finny tribes in general breathe the air 
which at all times is combined with the 
element in which they swim; hence, a 
herring or a cod might live a century, 
and never once raise its head above the 
surface. But owing to his marked 
internal structure which gives him 
regular lungs, like a human being’s, 
the whale can only live by inhaling the 
disengaged air in the open atmosphere. 
Wherefore the necessity for his 
periodical visits to the upper world. 
But he cannot in any degree breathe 
through his mouth, for, in his ordinary 
attitude, the Sperm Whale’s mouth is 
buried at least eight feet beneath the 
surface; and what is still more, his 
windpipe has no connexion with his 
mouth. No, he breathes through his 
spiracle alone; and this is on the top 
of his head.

If I say, that in any creature 
breathing is only a function 
indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as 
it withdraws from the air a certain 
element, which being subsequently 
brought into contact with the blood 
imparts to the blood its vivifying 
principle, I do not think I shall err; 
though I may possibly use some 
superfluous scientific words. Assume 
it, and it follows that if all the 
blood in a man could be aerated with 
one breath, he might then seal up his 
nostrils and not fetch another for a 
considerable time. That is to say, he 
would then live without breathing. 
Anomalous as it may seem, this is 
precisely the case with the whale, who 
systematically lives, by intervals, his 
full hour and more (when at the bottom) 
without drawing a single breath, or so 
much as in any way inhaling a particle 
of air; for, remember, he has no gills. 
How is this? Between his ribs and on 
each side of his spine he is supplied 
with a remarkable involved Cretan 
labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, 
which vessels, when he quits the 
surface, are completely distended with 
oxygenated blood. So that for an hour 
or more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, 
he carries a surplus stock of vitality 
in him, just as the camel crossing the 
waterless desert carries a surplus 
supply of drink for future use in its 
four supplementary stomachs. The 
anatomical fact of this labyrinth is 
indisputable; and that the supposition 
founded upon it is reasonable and true, 
seems the more cogent to me, when I 
consider the otherwise inexplicable 
obstinacy of that leviathan in having 
his spoutings out, as the fishermen 
phrase it. This is what I mean. If 
unmolested, upon rising to the surface, 
the Sperm Whale will continue there for 
a period of time exactly uniform with 
all his other unmolested risings. Say 
he stays eleven minutes, and jets 
seventy times, that is, respires 
seventy breaths; then whenever he rises 
again, he will be sure to have his 
seventy breaths over again, to a 
minute. Now, if after he fetches a few 
breaths you alarm him, so that he 
sounds, he will be always dodging up 
again to make good his regular 
allowance of air. And not till those 
seventy breaths are told, will he 
finally go down to stay out his full 
term below. Remark, however, that in 
different individuals these rates are 
different; but in any one they are 
alike. Now, why should the whale thus 
insist upon having his spoutings out, 
unless it be to replenish his reservoir 
of air, ere descending for good? How 
obvious is it, too, that this necessity 
for the whale’s rising exposes him to 
all the fatal hazards of the chase. For 
not by hook or by net could this vast 
leviathan be caught, when sailing a 
thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. 
Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, 
as the great necessities that strike 
the victory to thee!

In man, breathing is incessantly going 
on—one breath only serving for two or 
three pulsations; so that whatever 
other business he has to attend to, 
waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or 
die he will. But the Sperm Whale only 
breathes about one seventh or Sunday of 
his time.

It has been said that the whale only 
breathes through his spout-hole; if it 
could truthfully be added that his 
spouts are mixed with water, then I 
opine we should be furnished with the 
reason why his sense of smell seems 
obliterated in him; for the only thing 
about him that at all answers to his 
nose is that identical spout-hole; and 
being so clogged with two elements, it 
could not be expected to have the power 
of smelling. But owing to the mystery 
of the spout—whether it be water or 
whether it be vapour—no absolute 
certainty can as yet be arrived at on 
this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, 
that the Sperm Whale has no proper 
olfactories. But what does he want of 
them? No roses, no violets, no 
Cologne-water in the sea.

Furthermore, 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!

Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm 
Whale, chiefly intended as it is for 
the conveyance of air, and for several 
feet laid along, horizontally, just 
beneath the upper surface of his head, 
and a little to one side; this curious 
canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid 
down in a city on one side of a street. 
But the question returns whether this 
gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other 
words, whether the spout of the Sperm 
Whale is the mere vapour of the exhaled 
breath, or whether that exhaled breath 
is mixed with water taken in at the 
mouth, and discharged through the 
spiracle. It is certain that the mouth 
indirectly communicates with the 
spouting canal; but it cannot be proved 
that this is for the purpose of 
discharging water through the spiracle. 
Because the greatest necessity for so 
doing would seem to be, when in feeding 
he accidentally takes in water. But the 
Sperm Whale’s food is far beneath the 
surface, and there he cannot spout even 
if he would. Besides, if you regard him 
very closely, and time him with your 
watch, you will find that when 
unmolested, there is an undeviating 
rhyme between the periods of his jets 
and the ordinary periods of respiration.

But why pester one with all this 
reasoning on the subject? Speak out! 
You have seen him spout; then declare 
what the spout is; can you not tell 
water from air? My dear sir, in this 
world it is not so easy to settle these 
plain things. I have ever found your 
plain things the knottiest of all. And 
as for this whale spout, you might 
almost stand in it, and yet be 
undecided as to what it is precisely.

The central body of it is hidden in the 
snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and 
how can you certainly tell whether any 
water falls from it, when, always, when 
you are close enough to a whale to get 
a close view of his spout, he is in a 
prodigious commotion, the water 
cascading all around him. And if at 
such times you should think that you 
really perceived drops of moisture in 
the spout, how do you know that they 
are not merely condensed from its 
vapour; or how do you know that they 
are not those identical drops 
superficially lodged in the spout-hole 
fissure, which is countersunk into the 
summit of the whale’s head? For even 
when tranquilly swimming through the 
mid-day sea in a calm, with his 
elevated hump sun-dried as a 
dromedary’s in the desert; even then, 
the whale always carries a small basin 
of water on his head, as under a 
blazing sun you will sometimes see a 
cavity in a rock filled up with rain.

Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter 
to be over curious touching the precise 
nature of the whale spout. It will not 
do for him to be peering into it, and 
putting his face in it. You cannot go 
with your pitcher to this fountain and 
fill it, and bring it away. For even 
when coming into slight contact with 
the outer, vapoury shreds of the jet, 
which will often happen, your skin will 
feverishly smart, from the acridness of 
the thing so touching it. And I know 
one, who coming into still closer 
contact with the spout, whether with 
some scientific object in view, or 
otherwise, I cannot say, the skin 
peeled off from his cheek and arm. 
Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is 
deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. 
Another thing; I have heard it said, 
and I do not much doubt it, that if the 
jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, 
it will blind you. The wisest thing the 
investigator can do then, it seems to 
me, is to let this deadly spout alone.

Still, we can hypothesize, even if we 
cannot prove and establish. My 
hypothesis is this: that the spout is 
nothing but mist. And besides other 
reasons, to this conclusion I am 
impelled, by considerations touching 
the great inherent dignity and 
sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account 
him no common, shallow being, inasmuch 
as it is an undisputed fact that he is 
never found on soundings, or near 
shores; all other whales sometimes are. 
He is both ponderous and profound. And 
I am convinced that from the heads of 
all ponderous profound beings, such as 
Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, 
Dante, and so on, there always goes up 
a certain semi-visible steam, while in 
the act of thinking deep thoughts. 
While composing a little treatise on 
Eternity, I had the curiosity to place 
a mirror before me; and ere long saw 
reflected there, a curious involved 
worming and undulation in the 
atmosphere over my head. The invariable 
moisture of my hair, while plunged in 
deep thought, after six cups of hot tea 
in my thin shingled attic, of an August 
noon; this seems an additional argument 
for the above supposition.

And how nobly it raises our conceit of 
the mighty, misty monster, to behold 
him solemnly sailing through a calm 
tropical sea; his vast, mild head 
overhung by a canopy of vapour, 
engendered by his incommunicable 
contemplations, and that vapour—as you 
will sometimes see it—glorified by a 
rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put 
its seal upon his thoughts. For, d’ye 
see, rainbows do not visit the clear 
air; they only irradiate vapour. And 
so, through all the thick mists of the 
dim doubts in my mind, divine 
intuitions now and then shoot, 
enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. 
And for this I thank God; for all have 
doubts; many deny; but doubts or 
denials, few along with them, have 
intuitions. Doubts of all things 
earthly, and intuitions of some things 
heavenly; this combination makes 
neither believer nor infidel, but makes 
a man who regards them both with equal 
eye. 

 

CHAPTER 86. The Tail.

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.

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. 
As devout Eckerman lifted the linen 
sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, 
he was overwhelmed with the massive 
chest of the man, that seemed as a 
Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo 
paints even God the Father in human 
form, mark what robustness is there. 
And whatever they may reveal of the 
divine love in the Son, the soft, 
curled, hermaphroditical Italian 
pictures, in which his idea has been 
most successfully embodied; these 
pictures, so destitute as they are of 
all brawniness, hint nothing of any 
power, but the mere negative, feminine 
one of submission and endurance, which 
on all hands it is conceded, form the 
peculiar practical virtues of his 
teachings.

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.

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. On more accounts 
than one, 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. As Ptolemy Philopater 
testified of the African elephant, I 
then testified of the whale, 
pronouncing him the most devout of all 
beings. For according to King Juba, the 
military elephants of antiquity often 
hailed the morning with their trunks 
uplifted in the profoundest silence.

The chance comparison in this chapter, 
between the whale and the elephant, so 
far as some aspects of the tail of the 
one and the trunk of the other are 
concerned, should not tend to place 
those two opposite organs on an 
equality, much less the creatures to 
which they respectively belong. For as 
the mightiest elephant is but a terrier 
to Leviathan, so, compared with 
Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the 
stalk of a lily. The most direful blow 
from the elephant’s trunk were as the 
playful tap of a fan, compared with the 
measureless crush and crash of the 
sperm whale’s ponderous flukes, which 
in repeated instances have one after 
the other hurled entire boats with all 
their oars and crews into the air, very 
much as an Indian juggler tosses his 
balls.*

*Though all comparison in the way of 
general bulk between the whale and the 
elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as 
in that particular the elephant stands 
in much the same respect to the whale 
that a dog does to the elephant; 
nevertheless, there are not wanting 
some points of curious similitude; 
among these is the spout. It is well 
known that the elephant will often draw 
up water or dust in his trunk, and then 
elevating it, jet it forth in a stream.

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, occasionally, 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. But if I 
know not even the tail of this whale, 
how understand his head? much more, how 
comprehend his face, when face he has 
none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my 
tail, he seems to say, but my face 
shall not be seen. But I cannot 
completely make out his back parts; and 
hint what he will about his face, I say 
again he has no face. 

 

CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.

The long and narrow peninsula of 
Malacca, extending south-eastward from 
the territories of Birmah, forms the 
most southerly point of all Asia. In a 
continuous line from that peninsula 
stretch the long islands of Sumatra, 
Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with 
many others, form a vast mole, or 
rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia 
with Australia, and dividing the long 
unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly 
studded oriental archipelagoes. This 
rampart is pierced by several 
sally-ports for the convenience of 
ships and whales; conspicuous among 
which are the straits of Sunda and 
Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, 
chiefly, vessels bound to China from 
the west, emerge into the China seas.

Those narrow straits of Sunda divide 
Sumatra from Java; and standing midway 
in that vast rampart of islands, 
buttressed by that bold green 
promontory, known to seamen as Java 
Head; they not a little correspond to 
the central gateway opening into some 
vast walled empire: and considering the 
inexhaustible wealth of spices, and 
silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, 
with which the thousand islands of that 
oriental sea are enriched, it seems a 
significant provision of nature, that 
such treasures, by the very formation 
of the land, should at least bear the 
appearance, however ineffectual, of 
being guarded from the all-grasping 
western world. The shores of the 
Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with 
those domineering fortresses which 
guard the entrances to the 
Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the 
Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these 
Orientals do not demand the obsequious 
homage of lowered top-sails from the 
endless procession of ships before the 
wind, which for centuries past, by 
night and by day, have passed between 
the islands of Sumatra and Java, 
freighted with the costliest cargoes of 
the east. But while they freely waive a 
ceremonial like this, they do by no 
means renounce their claim to more 
solid tribute.

Time out of mind the piratical proas of 
the Malays, lurking among the low 
shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, 
have sallied out upon the vessels 
sailing through the straits, fiercely 
demanding tribute at the point of their 
spears. 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; 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, 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.

But how now? in this zoned quest, does 
Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink 
air? Surely, he will stop for water. 
Nay. For a long time, now, the 
circus-running sun has raced within his 
fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but 
what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, 
too, in the whaler. While other hulls 
are loaded down with alien stuff, to be 
transferred to foreign wharves; the 
world-wandering whale-ship carries no 
cargo but herself and crew, their 
weapons and their wants. She has a 
whole lake’s contents bottled in her 
ample hold. She is ballasted with 
utilities; not altogether with unusable 
pig-lead and kentledge. She carries 
years’ water in her. Clear old prime 
Nantucket water; which, when three 
years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the 
Pacific, prefers to drink before the 
brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted 
off in casks, from the Peruvian or 
Indian streams. Hence it is, that, 
while other ships may have gone to 
China from New York, and back again, 
touching at a score of ports, the 
whale-ship, in all that interval, may 
not have sighted one grain of soil; her 
crew having seen no man but floating 
seamen like themselves. So that did you 
carry them the news that another flood 
had come; they would only answer—“Well, 
boys, here’s the ark!”

Now, as many Sperm Whales had been 
captured off the western coast of Java, 
in the near vicinity of the Straits of 
Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground, 
roundabout, was generally recognised by 
the fishermen as an excellent spot for 
cruising; therefore, as the Pequod 
gained more and more upon Java Head, 
the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, 
and admonished to keep wide awake. 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.

Broad on both bows, at the distance of 
some two or three miles, and forming a 
great semicircle, 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 approaching an 
unfriendly defile in the mountains, 
accelerate their march, 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 seem hurrying 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;—Malays, sir, 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. But when the swift 
Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was 
herself in hot chase; 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, that they were. 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 
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.

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. 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, all human beings, how 
when herded together in the sheepfold 
of a theatre’s pit, they will, at the 
slightest alarm of fire, rush 
helter-skelter for the outlets, 
crowding, trampling, jamming, and 
remorselessly dashing each other to 
death. 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.

As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged 
forward, as if by sheer power of speed 
to rid himself of the iron leech that 
had fastened to him; as we thus tore a 
white gash in the sea, on all sides 
menaced as we flew, by the crazed 
creatures to and fro rushing about us; 
our beset boat was like a ship mobbed 
by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving 
to steer through their complicated 
channels and straits, knowing not at 
what moment it may be locked in and 
crushed.

But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered 
us manfully; now sheering off from this 
monster directly across our route in 
advance; now edging away from that, 
whose colossal flukes were suspended 
overhead, while all the time, Starbuck 
stood up in the bows, lance in hand, 
pricking out of our way whatever whales 
he could reach by short darts, for 
there was no time to make long ones. 
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.

All whaleboats carry certain curious 
contrivances, originally invented by 
the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. 
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 drugg is 
used. For then, more whales are close 
round you than you can possibly chase 
at one time. 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. 
Hence it is, that at times like these 
the drugg, 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 drugg. 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 drugged-harpoons, were it not 
that as we advanced into the herd, our 
whale’s way greatly diminished; 
moreover, that 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. And 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.

Now, inclusive of the occasional wide 
intervals between the revolving outer 
circles, and inclusive of the spaces 
between the various pods in any one of 
those circles, the entire area at this 
juncture, embraced by the whole 
multitude, must have contained at least 
two or three square miles. At any 
rate—though indeed such a test at such 
a time might be deceptive—spoutings 
might be discovered from our low boat 
that seemed playing up almost from the 
rim of the horizon. I mention this 
circumstance, because, as if the cows 
and calves had been purposely locked up 
in this innermost fold; and as if the 
wide extent of the herd had hitherto 
prevented them from learning the 
precise cause of its stopping; or, 
possibly, being so young, 
unsophisticated, and every way innocent 
and inexperienced; however it may have 
been, these smaller whales—now and then 
visiting our becalmed boat from the 
margin of the lake—evinced a wondrous 
fearlessness and confidence, or else a 
still becharmed panic 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. For, 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 yet 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.*

*The sperm whale, as with all other 
species of the Leviathan, but unlike 
most other fish, 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; but the breasts 
themselves extend upwards from that. 
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. When 
overflowing with mutual esteem, the 
whales salute more hominum.

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.

Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, 
the occasional sudden frantic 
spectacles in the distance evinced the 
activity of the other boats, still 
engaged in drugging 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 
drugged 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. 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 like the 
lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the 
battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay 
wherever he went.

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 stern.

“Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, 
seizing the helm—“gripe your oars, and 
clutch your souls, now! My God, men, 
stand by! Shove him off, you 
Queequeg—the whale there!—prick 
him!—hit him! Stand up—stand up, and 
stay so! Spring, men—pull, men; never 
mind their backs—scrape them!—scrape 
away!”

The boat was now all but jammed between 
two vast black bulks, leaving a narrow 
Dardanelles between their long lengths. 
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 
drugged 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 drugged 
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 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.

The previous chapter gave account of an 
immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, 
and there was also then given the 
probable cause inducing those vast 
aggregations.

Now, though such great bodies are at 
times encountered, yet, as must have 
been seen, even at the present day, 
small detached bands are occasionally 
observed, embracing from twenty to 
fifty individuals each. Such bands are 
known as schools. They generally are of 
two sorts; those composed almost 
entirely of females, and those 
mustering none but young vigorous 
males, or bulls, as they are familiarly 
designated.

In cavalier attendance upon the school 
of females, you invariably see a male 
of full grown magnitude, but not old; 
who, upon any alarm, evinces his 
gallantry by falling in the rear and 
covering the flight of his ladies. In 
truth, this gentleman is a luxurious 
Ottoman, swimming about over the watery 
world, surroundingly accompanied by all 
the solaces and endearments of the 
harem. The contrast between this 
Ottoman and his concubines is striking; 
because, while he is always of the 
largest leviathanic proportions, the 
ladies, even at full growth, are not 
more than one-third of the bulk of an 
average-sized male. They are 
comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare 
say, not to exceed half a dozen yards 
round the waist. Nevertheless, it 
cannot be denied, that upon the whole 
they are hereditarily entitled to 
embonpoint.

It is very curious to watch this harem 
and its lord in their indolent 
ramblings. Like fashionables, they are 
for ever on the move in leisurely 
search of variety. You meet them on the 
Line in time for the full flower of the 
Equatorial feeding season, having just 
returned, perhaps, from spending the 
summer in the Northern seas, and so 
cheating summer of all unpleasant 
weariness and warmth. By the time they 
have lounged up and down the promenade 
of the Equator awhile, they start for 
the Oriental waters in anticipation of 
the cool season there, and so evade the 
other excessive temperature of the year.

When serenely advancing on one of these 
journeys, if any strange suspicious 
sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a 
wary eye on his interesting family. 
Should any unwarrantably pert young 
Leviathan coming that way, presume to 
draw confidentially close to one of the 
ladies, with what prodigious fury the 
Bashaw assails him, and chases him 
away! High times, indeed, if 
unprincipled young rakes like him are 
to be permitted to invade the sanctity 
of domestic bliss; though do what the 
Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most 
notorious Lothario out of his bed; for, 
alas! all fish bed in common. As 
ashore, the ladies often cause the most 
terrible duels among their rival 
admirers; just so with the whales, who 
sometimes come to deadly battle, and 
all for love. They fence with their 
long lower jaws, sometimes locking them 
together, and so striving for the 
supremacy like elks that warringly 
interweave their antlers. Not a few are 
captured having the deep scars of these 
encounters,—furrowed heads, broken 
teeth, scolloped fins; and in some 
instances, wrenched and dislocated 
mouths.

But supposing the invader of domestic 
bliss to betake himself away at the 
first rush of the harem’s lord, then is 
it very diverting to watch that lord. 
Gently he insinuates his vast bulk 
among them again and revels there 
awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity 
to young Lothario, like pious Solomon 
devoutly worshipping among his thousand 
concubines. Granting other whales to be 
in sight, the fishermen will seldom 
give chase to one of these Grand Turks; 
for these Grand Turks are too lavish of 
their strength, and hence their 
unctuousness is small. As for the sons 
and the daughters they beget, why, 
those sons and daughters must take care 
of themselves; at least, with only the 
maternal help. For like certain other 
omnivorous roving lovers that might be 
named, my Lord Whale has no taste for 
the nursery, however much for the 
bower; and so, being a great traveller, 
he leaves his anonymous babies all over 
the world; every baby an exotic. In 
good time, nevertheless, as the ardour 
of youth declines; as years and dumps 
increase; as reflection lends her 
solemn pauses; in short, as a general 
lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; 
then a love of ease and virtue 
supplants the love for maidens; our 
Ottoman enters upon the impotent, 
repentant, admonitory stage of life, 
forswears, disbands the harem, and 
grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, 
goes about all alone among the 
meridians and parallels saying his 
prayers, and warning each young 
Leviathan from his amorous errors.

Now, as the harem of whales is called 
by the fishermen a school, so is the 
lord and master of that school 
technically known as the schoolmaster. 
It is therefore not in strict 
character, however admirably satirical, 
that after going to school himself, he 
should then go abroad inculcating not 
what he learned there, but the folly of 
it. His title, schoolmaster, would very 
naturally seem derived from the name 
bestowed upon the harem itself, but 
some have surmised that the man who 
first thus entitled this sort of 
Ottoman whale, must have read the 
memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself 
what sort of a country-schoolmaster 
that famous Frenchman was in his 
younger days, and what was the nature 
of those occult lessons he inculcated 
into some of his pupils.

The same secludedness and isolation to 
which the schoolmaster whale betakes 
himself in his advancing years, is true 
of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost 
universally, a lone whale—as a solitary 
Leviathan is called—proves an ancient 
one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel 
Boone, he will have no one near him but 
Nature herself; and her he takes to 
wife in the wilderness of waters, and 
the best of wives she is, though she 
keeps so many moody secrets.

The schools composing none but young 
and vigorous males, previously 
mentioned, offer a strong contrast to 
the harem schools. For while those 
female whales are characteristically 
timid, the young males, or 
forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, 
are by far the most pugnacious of all 
Leviathans, and proverbially the most 
dangerous to encounter; excepting those 
wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, 
sometimes met, and these will fight you 
like grim fiends exasperated by a penal 
gout.

The Forty-barrel-bull schools are 
larger than the harem schools. Like a 
mob of young collegians, they are full 
of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling 
round the world at such a reckless, 
rollicking rate, that no prudent 
underwriter would insure them any more 
than he would a riotous lad at Yale or 
Harvard. They soon relinquish this 
turbulence though, and when about 
three-fourths grown, break up, and 
separately go about in quest of 
settlements, that is, harems.

Another point of difference between the 
male and female schools is still more 
characteristic of the sexes. Say you 
strike a Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! 
all his comrades quit him. But strike a 
member of the harem school, and her 
companions swim around her with every 
token of concern, sometimes lingering 
so near her and so long, as themselves 
to fall a prey. 

 

CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.

The allusion to the waif and waif-poles 
in the last chapter but one, 
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.

These are scientific commentaries; but 
the commentaries of the whalemen 
themselves sometimes consist in hard 
words and harder knocks—the 
Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, 
among the more upright and honourable 
whalemen allowances are always made for 
peculiar cases, where it would be an 
outrageous moral injustice for one 
party to claim possession of a whale 
previously chased or killed by another 
party. But others are by no means so 
scrupulous.

Some fifty years ago there was a 
curious case of whale-trover litigated 
in England, wherein the plaintiffs set 
forth that after a hard chase of a 
whale in the Northern seas; and when 
indeed they (the plaintiffs) had 
succeeded in harpooning the fish; they 
were at last, through peril of their 
lives, obliged to forsake not only 
their lines, but their boat itself. 
Ultimately the defendants (the crew of 
another ship) came up with the whale, 
struck, killed, seized, and finally 
appropriated it before the very eyes of 
the plaintiffs. And when those 
defendants were remonstrated with, 
their captain snapped his fingers in 
the plaintiffs’ teeth, and assured them 
that by way of doxology to the deed he 
had done, he would now retain their 
line, harpoons, and boat, which had 
remained attached to the whale at the 
time of the seizure. Wherefore the 
plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of 
the value of their whale, line, 
harpoons, and boat.

Mr. Erskine was counsel for the 
defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the 
judge. In the course of the defence, 
the witty Erskine went on to illustrate 
his position, by alluding to a recent 
crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, 
after in vain trying to bridle his 
wife’s viciousness, had at last 
abandoned her upon the seas of life; 
but in the course of years, repenting 
of that step, he instituted an action 
to recover possession of her. Erskine 
was on the other side; and he then 
supported it by saying, that though the 
gentleman had originally harpooned the 
lady, and had once had her fast, and 
only by reason of the great stress of 
her plunging viciousness, had at last 
abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, 
so that she became a loose-fish; and 
therefore when a subsequent gentleman 
re-harpooned her, the lady then became 
that subsequent gentleman’s property, 
along with whatever harpoon might have 
been found sticking in her.

Now in the present case Erskine 
contended that the examples of the 
whale and the lady were reciprocally 
illustrative of each other.

These pleadings, and the counter 
pleadings, being duly heard, the very 
learned Judge in set terms decided, to 
wit,—That as for the boat, he awarded 
it to the plaintiffs, because they had 
merely abandoned it to save their 
lives; but that with regard to the 
controverted whale, harpoons, and line, 
they belonged to the defendants; the 
whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at 
the time of the final capture; and the 
harpoons and line because when the fish 
made off with them, it (the fish) 
acquired a property in those articles; 
and hence anybody who afterwards took 
the fish had a right to them. Now the 
defendants afterwards took the fish; 
ergo, the aforesaid articles were 
theirs.

A common man looking at this decision 
of the very learned Judge, might 
possibly object to it. But ploughed up 
to the primary rock of the matter, the 
two great principles laid down in the 
twin whaling laws previously quoted, 
and applied and elucidated by Lord 
Ellenborough in the above cited case; 
these two laws touching Fast-Fish and 
Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, 
be found the fundamentals of all human 
jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its 
complicated tracery of sculpture, the 
Temple of the Law, like the Temple of 
the Philistines, has but two props to 
stand on.

Is it not a saying in every one’s 
mouth, Possession is half of the law: 
that is, regardless of how the thing 
came into possession? But often 
possession is the whole of the law. 
What are the sinews and souls of 
Russian serfs and Republican slaves but 
Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the 
whole of the law? What to the rapacious 
landlord is the widow’s last mite but a 
Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected 
villain’s marble mansion with a 
door-plate for a waif; what is that but 
a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous 
discount which Mordecai, the broker, 
gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, 
on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family 
from starvation; what is that ruinous 
discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the 
Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of 
L100,000 seized from the scant bread 
and cheese of hundreds of thousands of 
broken-backed laborers (all sure of 
heaven without any of Savesoul’s help) 
what is that globular L100,000 but a 
Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of 
Dunder’s hereditary towns and hamlets 
but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted 
harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, 
but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic 
lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but 
a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, 
is not Possession the whole of the law?

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be 
pretty generally applicable, the 
kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still 
more widely so. That is internationally 
and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a 
Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck 
the Spanish standard by way of waifing 
it for his royal master and mistress? 
What was Poland to the Czar? What 
Greece to the Turk? What India to 
England? What at last will Mexico be to 
the United States? All Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the 
Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? 
What all men’s minds and opinions but 
Loose-Fish? What is the principle of 
religious belief in them 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, reader, but a 
Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too? 

 

CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.

“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat 
caput, et regina caudam.” Bracton, l. 
3, c. 3.

Latin from the books of the Laws of 
England, which taken along with the 
context, means, that of all whales 
captured by anybody on the coast of 
that land, the King, as Honourary Grand 
Harpooneer, must have the head, and the 
Queen be respectfully presented with 
the tail. A division which, in the 
whale, is much like halving an apple; 
there is no intermediate remainder. Now 
as this law, under a modified form, is 
to this day in force in England; and as 
it offers in various respects a strange 
anomaly touching the general law of 
Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated 
of in a separate chapter, on the same 
courteous principle that prompts the 
English railways to be at the expense 
of a separate car, specially reserved 
for the accommodation of royalty. In 
the first place, in curious proof of 
the fact that the above-mentioned law 
is still in force, I proceed to lay 
before you a circumstance that happened 
within the last two years.

It seems that some honest mariners of 
Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the 
Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase 
succeeded in killing and beaching a 
fine whale which they had originally 
descried afar off from the shore. Now 
the Cinque Ports are partially or 
somehow under the jurisdiction of a 
sort of policeman or beadle, called a 
Lord Warden. Holding the office 
directly from the crown, I believe, all 
the royal emoluments incident to the 
Cinque Port territories become by 
assignment his. By some writers this 
office is called a sinecure. But not 
so. Because the Lord Warden is busily 
employed at times in fobbing his 
perquisites; which are his chiefly by 
virtue of that same fobbing of them.

Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, 
bare-footed, and with their trowsers 
rolled high up on their eely legs, had 
wearily hauled their fat fish high and 
dry, promising themselves a good L150 
from the precious oil and bone; and in 
fantasy sipping rare tea with their 
wives, and good ale with their cronies, 
upon the strength of their respective 
shares; up steps a very learned and 
most Christian and charitable 
gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone 
under his arm; and laying it upon the 
whale’s head, he says—“Hands off! this 
fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I 
seize it as the Lord Warden’s.” Upon 
this the poor mariners in their 
respectful consternation—so truly 
English—knowing not what to say, fall 
to vigorously scratching their heads 
all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing 
from the whale to the stranger. But 
that did in nowise mend the matter, or 
at all soften the hard heart of the 
learned gentleman with the copy of 
Blackstone. At length one of them, 
after long scratching about for his 
ideas, made bold to speak,

“Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”

“The Duke.”

“But the duke had nothing to do with 
taking this fish?”

“It is his.”

“We have been at great trouble, and 
peril, and some expense, and is all 
that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we 
getting nothing at all for our pains 
but our blisters?”

“It is his.”

“Is the Duke so very poor as to be 
forced to this desperate mode of 
getting a livelihood?”

“It is his.”

“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden 
mother by part of my share of this 
whale.”

“It is his.”

“Won’t the Duke be content with a 
quarter or a half?”

“It is his.”

In a word, the whale was seized and 
sold, and his Grace the Duke of 
Wellington received the money. Thinking 
that viewed in some particular lights, 
the case might by a bare possibility in 
some small degree be deemed, under the 
circumstances, a rather hard one, an 
honest clergyman of the town 
respectfully addressed a note to his 
Grace, begging him to take the case of 
those unfortunate mariners into full 
consideration. To which my Lord Duke in 
substance replied (both letters were 
published) that he had already done so, 
and received the money, and would be 
obliged to the reverend gentleman if 
for the future he (the reverend 
gentleman) would decline meddling with 
other people’s business. Is this the 
still militant old man, standing at the 
corners of the three kingdoms, on all 
hands coercing alms of beggars?

It will readily be seen that in this 
case the alleged right of the Duke to 
the whale was a delegated one from the 
Sovereign. We must needs inquire then 
on what principle the Sovereign is 
originally invested with that right. 
The law itself has already been set 
forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason 
for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so 
caught belongs to the King and Queen, 
“because of its superior excellence.” 
And by the soundest commentators this 
has ever been held a cogent argument in 
such matters.

But why should the King have the head, 
and the Queen the tail? A reason for 
that, ye lawyers!

In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or 
Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench 
author, one William Prynne, thus 
discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, 
that ye Queen’s wardrobe may be 
supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this 
was written at a time when the black 
limber bone of the Greenland or Right 
whale was largely used in ladies’ 
bodices. But this same bone is not in 
the tail; it is in the head, which is a 
sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like 
Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to 
be presented with a tail? An 
allegorical meaning may lurk here.

There are two royal fish so styled by 
the English law writers—the whale and 
the sturgeon; both royal property under 
certain limitations, and nominally 
supplying the tenth branch of the 
crown’s ordinary revenue. I know not 
that any other author has hinted of the 
matter; but by inference it seems to me 
that the sturgeon must be divided in 
the same way as the whale, the King 
receiving the highly dense and elastic 
head peculiar to that fish, which, 
symbolically regarded, may possibly be 
humorously grounded upon some presumed 
congeniality. And thus there seems a 
reason in all things, even in law. 

 

CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The 
Rose-Bud.

“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese 
in the paunch of this Leviathan, 
insufferable fetor denying not 
inquiry.” Sir T. Browne, V.E.

It was a week or two after the last 
whaling scene recounted, and when we 
were slowly sailing over a sleepy, 
vapoury, mid-day sea, that the many 
noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more 
vigilant discoverers than the three 
pairs of eyes aloft. 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 drugged 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; sometimes lowering their boats 
for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm 
Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes 
sailing from their port with their hold 
full of boxes of tallow candles, and 
cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all 
the oil they will get won’t be enough 
to dip the Captain’s wick into; aye, we 
all know these things; but look ye, 
here’s a Crappo that is content with 
our leavings, the drugged 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 drugged 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.

Though Stubb did not understand the 
Bouton part of the inscription, yet the 
word rose, and the bulbous figure-head 
put together, sufficiently explained 
the whole to him.

“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!”

Now in order to hold direct 
communication with the people on deck, 
he 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 
Blanche! 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 awaiting his 
report, he moulded his two hands into a 
trumpet and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon 
which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned 
to the Frenchman.

He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, 
who had just got into the chains, and 
was using a cutting-spade, had slung 
his nose in a sort of bag.

“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 gill 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.

Stubb was struck by a shower of 
outcries and anathemas proceeding from 
the Captain’s round-house abaft; and 
looking in that direction saw a fiery 
face thrust from behind the door, which 
was held ajar from within. This was the 
tormented surgeon, who, after in vain 
remonstrating against the proceedings 
of the day, had betaken himself to the 
Captain’s round-house (cabinet he 
called it) to avoid the pest; but 
still, could not help yelling out his 
entreaties and indignations at times.

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. He 
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 
died of a fever 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; in 
fine, 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 any 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 drop 
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, then, were engaged 
in towing the ship one way, Stubb 
benevolently towed away at his whale 
the other way, ostentatiously slacking 
out a most unusually long tow-line.

Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb 
feigned to cast off from the whale; 
hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon 
increased his distance, while the 
Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s 
whale. 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 92. 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 learned. 
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 
pastiles, 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 boat loads 
of Brandreth’s 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 bones 
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 dishonour, but raised in 
glory. And likewise call to mind that 
saying of Paracelsus about what it is 
that maketh the best musk. Also forget 
not the strange fact that of all things 
of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its 
rudimental manufacturing stages, is the 
worst.

I should like to conclude the chapter 
with the above appeal, but cannot, 
owing to my anxiety to repel a charge 
often made against whalemen, and which, 
in the estimation of some already 
biased minds, might be considered as 
indirectly substantiated by what has 
been said of the Frenchman’s two 
whales. 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, in the Greenland dock, 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.

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. 
The truth is, that living or dead, if 
but decently treated, whales as a 
species are by no means creatures of 
ill odor; nor can whalemen be 
recognised, as the people of the middle 
ages affected to detect a Jew in the 
company, by the nose. 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? 

 

CHAPTER 93. 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. 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 the little negro Pippin by 
nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor 
Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye 
must remember his tambourine on that 
dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.

In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made 
a match, like a black pony and a white 
one, of equal developments, though of 
dissimilar colour, driven in one 
eccentric span. But while hapless 
Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid 
in his intellects, Pip, though over 
tender-hearted, was at bottom very 
bright, with that pleasant, genial, 
jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; 
a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays 
and festivities with finer, freer 
relish than any other race. For blacks, 
the year’s calendar should show naught 
but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth 
of Julys and New Year’s Days. Nor smile 
so, while I write that this little 
black was brilliant, for even blackness 
has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous 
ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But 
Pip loved life, and all life’s 
peaceable securities; so that the 
panic-striking business in which he had 
somehow unaccountably become entrapped, 
had most sadly blurred his brightness; 
though, as ere long will be seen, what 
was thus temporarily subdued in him, in 
the end was destined to be luridly 
illumined by strange wild fires, that 
fictitiously showed him off to ten 
times the natural lustre with which in 
his native Tolland County in 
Connecticut, he had once enlivened many 
a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at 
melodious even-tide, with his gay 
ha-ha! had turned the round horizon 
into one star-belled tambourine. 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, that in the ambergris 
affair Stubb’s after-oarsman chanced so 
to sprain his hand, as for a time to 
become quite maimed; and, temporarily, 
Pip was put into his place.

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, the 
poor little negro was assailed by yells 
and execrations from the crew. 
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 for the future; Stubb 
suddenly dropped all advice, and 
concluded with a peremptory command, 
“Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the 
Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; 
mind that. We can’t afford to lose 
whales by the likes of you; a whale 
would sell for thirty times what you 
would, Pip, in Alabama. 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 practised 
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 the poor 
little negro 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, so called, is marked with the 
same ruthless detestation peculiar to 
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 
little negro went about the deck an 
idiot; such, at least, they said he 
was. The sea had jeeringly kept his 
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; and among 
the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile 
eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, 
God-omnipresent, coral insects, that 
out of the firmament of waters heaved 
the colossal orbs. 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 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.

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 molifier! 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; in 
that inexpressible sperm, I washed my 
hands and my heart of it; 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 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.

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.

Gurry, so called, is a term properly 
belonging to right whalemen, but 
sometimes incidentally used by the 
sperm fishermen. It designates the 
dark, glutinous substance which is 
scraped off the back of the Greenland 
or right whale, and much of which 
covers the decks of those inferior 
souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.

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.

But 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-gaffman and a spade-man. The 
whaling-pike is similar to a frigate’s 
boarding-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. 

 

CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.

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.

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 grenadier 
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!*

*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. 

 

CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.

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. 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.

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, 
Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk 
in the vicinity of funereal pyres. 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.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her 
helm, and for long hours silently 
guided the way of this fire-ship on the 
sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in 
darkness myself, 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.

But that night, in particular, a 
strange (and ever since inexplicable) 
thing occurred to me. Starting from a 
brief standing sleep, I was horribly 
conscious of something fatally wrong. 
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; though it seemed but a minute 
since I had been watching the card, by 
the steady binnacle lamp illuminating 
it. 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 sleep 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. How 
glad and how grateful the relief from 
this unnatural hallucination of the 
night, and the fatal contingency of 
being brought by the lee!

Look not too long in the face of the 
fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand 
on the helm! Turn not thy back to the 
compass; accept the first hint of the 
hitching tiller; believe not the 
artificial fire, when its redness makes 
all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in 
the natural sun, the skies will be 
bright; those who glared like devils in 
the forking flames, the morn will show 
in far other, at least gentler, relief; 
the glorious, golden, glad sun, the 
only true lamp—all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides 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, or 
undeveloped. 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. This wilful world hath not got 
hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom 
yet. But he who dodges hospitals and 
jails, and walks fast crossing 
graveyards, and would rather talk of 
operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, 
Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of 
sick men; and throughout a care-free 
lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing 
wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man 
is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, 
and break the green damp mould with 
unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “the man 
that wandereth out of the way of 
understanding shall remain” (i.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 97. The Lamp.

Had you descended from the Pequod’s 
try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle, 
where the off duty watch were sleeping, 
for one single moment you would have 
almost thought you were standing in 
some illuminated shrine of canonized 
kings and counsellors. There they lay 
in their triangular oaken vaults, each 
mariner a chiselled muteness; a score 
of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.

In merchantmen, 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 
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.

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 the 
traveller on the prairie hunts up his 
own supper of game. 

 

CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing 
Up.

Already has it been related how the 
great leviathan is afar off descried 
from the mast-head; how he is chased 
over the watery moors, and slaughtered 
in the valleys of the deep; how he is 
then towed alongside and beheaded; and 
how (on the principle which entitled 
the headsman of old to the garments in 
which the beheaded was killed) his 
great padded surtout becomes the 
property of his executioner; how, in 
due time, he is condemned to the pots, 
and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and 
Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone 
pass unscathed through the fire;—but 
now it remains to conclude the last 
chapter of this part of the description 
by rehearsing—singing, if I may—the 
romantic proceeding of decanting off 
his oil into the casks and striking 
them down into the hold, where once 
again leviathan returns to his native 
profundities, sliding along beneath the 
surface as before; but, alas! never 
more to rise and blow.

While still warm, the oil, like hot 
punch, is received into the six-barrel 
casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is 
pitching and rolling this way and that 
in the midnight sea, the enormous casks 
are slewed round and headed over, end 
for end, and sometimes perilously scoot 
across the slippery deck, like so many 
land slides, till at last man-handled 
and stayed in their course; and all 
round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many 
hammers as can play upon them, for now, 
ex officio, every sailor is a cooper.

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 boats and try-works, you 
would all but swear you trod some 
silent merchant vessel, with a most 
scrupulously neat commander. The 
unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a 
singularly cleansing virtue. 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. The 
great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon 
the try-works, completely hiding the 
pots; 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.

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; think of having hanging 
to the top; 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. 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 its 
defilements, and learned to live here 
in clean tabernacles of the soul; 
hardly is this done, when—There she 
blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and 
away we sail 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! 

 

CHAPTER 99. 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 for the first time beginning to 
interpret for himself in some 
monomaniac way whatever significance 
might lurk in them. 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, as they 
do hills about Boston, to fill up some 
morass in the Milky Way.

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 amidst 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.

Now those noble golden coins of South 
America are as medals of the sun and 
tropic token-pieces. Here palms, 
alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s disks and 
stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and 
rich banners waving, are in luxuriant 
profusion stamped; so that the precious 
gold seems almost to derive an added 
preciousness and enhancing glories, by 
passing through those fancy mints, so 
Spanishly poetic.

It so chanced that the doubloon of the 
Pequod was a most wealthy example of 
these things. 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.

Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not 
unobserved by others, 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. 
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.”

“No fairy fingers can have pressed the 
gold, but devil’s claws must have left 
their mouldings there since yesterday,” 
murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning 
against the bulwarks. “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 Negro Hill 
or in Corlaer’s Hook, 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. 
That’s my small experience, so far as 
the Massachusetts calendar, and 
Bowditch’s navigator, and Daboll’s 
arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? 
Pity if there is nothing wonderful in 
signs, and significant in wonders! 
There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; 
hist—hark! By Jove, I have it! Look 
you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the 
life of man in one round chapter; and 
now I’ll read it off, straight out of 
the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: 
there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous 
dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the 
Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then 
Gemini, or the Twins—that is, Virtue 
and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when 
lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us 
back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, 
a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he 
gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs 
with his paw; we escape, and hail 
Virgo, the Virgin! that’s our first 
love; we marry and think to be happy 
for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the 
Scales—happiness weighed and found 
wanting; and while we are very sad 
about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, 
as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us 
in the rear; we are curing the wound, 
when whang come the arrows all round; 
Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing 
himself. 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 he, aloft 
there, 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.”

“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. What does he say, 
with that look of his? Ah, only makes a 
sign to the sign and bows himself; 
there is a sun on the coin—fire 
worshipper, depend upon it. 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 bats; and I’m a crow, 
especially when I stand a’top of this 
pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! 
caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s 
the scare-crow? There he stands; two 
bones stuck into a pair of old 
trowsers, and two more poked into the 
sleeves of an old jacket.”

“Wonder if he means 
me?—complimentary!—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; 
he’ll nail ye! This is 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 old 
darkey’s wedding ring. 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 
miser’ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God 
goes ‘mong the worlds blackberrying. 
Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! 
hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! 
and get your hoe-cake done!” 

 

CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm. The Pequod, 
of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, 
of London.

“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!”

In less than a minute, without quitting 
his little craft, he and his crew were 
dropped to the water, and were soon 
alongside of the stranger. But here a 
curious difficulty presented itself. In 
the excitement of the moment, Ahab had 
forgotten that since the loss of his 
leg he had never once stepped on board 
of any vessel at sea but his own, and 
then it was always by an ingenious and 
very handy mechanical contrivance 
peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not 
to be rigged and shipped in any other 
vessel at a moment’s warning. Now, it 
is no very easy matter for 
anybody—except those who are almost 
hourly used to it, like whalemen—to 
clamber up a ship’s side from a boat on 
the open sea; for the great swells now 
lift the boat high up towards the 
bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop 
it half way down to the kelson. So, 
deprived of one leg, and the strange 
ship of course being altogether 
unsupplied with the kindly invention, 
Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced 
to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly 
eyeing the uncertain changeful height 
he could hardly hope to attain.

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, all 
this was heightened by the sight of the 
two officers of the strange ship, 
leaning over the side, by the 
perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets 
there, and swinging towards him a pair 
of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for 
at first they did not seem to bethink 
them that a one-legged man must be too 
much of a cripple to use their sea 
bannisters. 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.

“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, 
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.”

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 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 stranger ship, and face set like 
a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright 
till alongside of the Pequod. 

 

CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.

Ere the English ship fades from sight, 
be it set down here, that she hailed 
from London, and was named after the 
late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that 
city, the original of the famous 
whaling house of Enderby & Sons; a 
house which in my poor whaleman’s 
opinion, comes not far behind the 
united royal houses of the Tudors and 
Bourbons, in point of real historical 
interest. How long, prior to the year 
of our Lord 1775, this great whaling 
house was in existence, my numerous 
fish-documents do not make plain; but 
in that year (1775) it fitted out the 
first English ships that ever regularly 
hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some 
score of years previous (ever since 
1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of 
Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large 
fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only 
in the North and South Atlantic: not 
elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded 
here, that the Nantucketers were the 
first among mankind to harpoon with 
civilized steel the great Sperm Whale; 
and that for half a century they were 
the only people of the whole globe who 
so harpooned him.

In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, 
fitted out for the express purpose, and 
at the sole charge of the vigorous 
Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and 
was the first among the nations to 
lower a whale-boat of any sort in the 
great South Sea. The voyage was a 
skilful and lucky one; and returning to 
her berth with her hold full of the 
precious sperm, the Amelia’s example 
was soon followed by other ships, 
English and American, and thus the vast 
Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were 
thrown open. But not content with this 
good deed, the indefatigable house 
again bestirred itself: Samuel and all 
his Sons—how many, their mother only 
knows—and under their immediate 
auspices, and partly, I think, at their 
expense, the British government was 
induced to send the sloop-of-war 
Rattler on a whaling voyage of 
discovery into the South Sea. Commanded 
by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler 
made a rattling voyage of it, and did 
some service; how much does not appear. 
But this is not all. In 1819, the same 
house fitted out a discovery whale ship 
of their own, to go on a tasting cruise 
to the remote waters of Japan. That 
ship—well called the “Syren”—made a 
noble experimental cruise; and it was 
thus that the great Japanese Whaling 
Ground first became generally known. 
The Syren in this famous voyage was 
commanded by a Captain Coffin, a 
Nantucketer.

All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, 
whose house, I think, exists to the 
present day; though doubtless the 
original Samuel must long ago have 
slipped his cable for the great South 
Sea of the other world.

The ship named after him was worthy of 
the honour, being a very fast sailer 
and a noble craft every way. I boarded 
her once at midnight somewhere off the 
Patagonian coast, and drank good flip 
down in the forecastle. It was a fine 
gam we had, and they were all 
trumps—every soul on board. A short 
life to them, and a jolly death. And 
that fine gam I had—long, very long 
after old Ahab touched her planks with 
his ivory heel—it minds me of the 
noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that 
ship; and may my parson forget me, and 
the devil remember me, if I ever lose 
sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had 
flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the 
rate of ten gallons the hour; and when 
the squall came (for it’s squally off 
there by Patagonia), and all 
hands—visitors and all—were called to 
reef topsails, we were so top-heavy 
that we had to swing each other aloft 
in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled 
the skirts of our jackets into the 
sails, so that we hung there, reefed 
fast in the howling gale, a warning 
example to all drunken tars. However, 
the masts did not go overboard; and by 
and by we scrambled down, so sober, 
that we had to pass the flip again, 
though the savage salt spray bursting 
down the forecastle scuttle, rather too 
much diluted and pickled it to my taste.

The beef was fine—tough, but with body 
in it. They said it was bull-beef; 
others, that it was dromedary beef; but 
I do not know, for certain, how that 
was. They had dumplings too; small, but 
substantial, symmetrically globular, 
and indestructible dumplings. I fancied 
that you could feel them, and roll them 
about in you after they were swallowed. 
If you stooped over too far forward, 
you risked their pitching out of you 
like billiard-balls. The bread—but that 
couldn’t be helped; besides, it was an 
anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread 
contained the only fresh fare they had. 
But the forecastle was not very light, 
and it was very easy to step over into 
a dark corner when you ate it. But all 
in all, taking her from truck to helm, 
considering the dimensions of the 
cook’s boilers, including his own live 
parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, 
the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of 
good fare and plenty; fine flip and 
strong; crack fellows all, and capital 
from boot heels to hat-band.

But why was it, think ye, that the 
Samuel Enderby, and some other English 
whalers I know of—not all though—were 
such famous, hospitable ships; that 
passed round the beef, and the bread, 
and the can, and the joke; and were not 
soon weary of eating, and drinking, and 
laughing? I will tell you. The 
abounding good cheer of these English 
whalers is matter for historical 
research. Nor have I been at all 
sparing of historical whale research, 
when it has seemed needed.

The English were preceded in the whale 
fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders, 
and Danes; from whom they derived many 
terms still extant in the fishery; and 
what is yet more, their fat old 
fashions, touching plenty to eat and 
drink. For, as a general thing, the 
English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; 
but not so the English whaler. Hence, 
in the English, this thing of whaling 
good cheer is not normal and natural, 
but incidental and particular; and, 
therefore, must have some special 
origin, which is here pointed out, and 
will be still further elucidated.

During my researches in the Leviathanic 
histories, I stumbled upon an ancient 
Dutch volume, which, by the musty 
whaling smell of it, I knew must be 
about whalers. The title was, “Dan 
Coopman,” wherefore I concluded that 
this must be the invaluable memoirs of 
some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, 
as every whale ship must carry its 
cooper. I was reinforced in this 
opinion by seeing that it was the 
production of one “Fitz Swackhammer.” 
But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very 
learned man, professor of Low Dutch and 
High German in the college of Santa 
Claus and St. Pott’s, to whom I handed 
the work for translation, giving him a 
box of sperm candles for his 
trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon 
as he spied the book, assured me that 
“Dan Coopman” did not mean “The 
Cooper,” but “The Merchant.” In short, 
this ancient and learned Low Dutch book 
treated of the commerce of Holland; 
and, among other subjects, contained a 
very interesting account of its whale 
fishery. And in this chapter it was, 
headed, “Smeer,” or “Fat,” that I found 
a long detailed list of the outfits for 
the larders and cellars of 180 sail of 
Dutch whalemen; from which list, as 
translated by Dr. Snodhead, I 
transcribe the following:

400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. 
Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock 
fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 
lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of 
butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden 
cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese (probably 
an inferior article). 550 ankers of 
Geneva. 10,800 barrels of beer.

Most statistical tables are parchingly 
dry in the reading; not so in the 
present case, however, where the reader 
is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, 
quarts, and gills of good gin and good 
cheer.

At the time, I devoted three days to 
the studious digesting of all this 
beer, beef, and bread, during which 
many profound thoughts were 
incidentally suggested to me, capable 
of a transcendental and Platonic 
application; and, furthermore, I 
compiled supplementary tables of my 
own, touching the probable quantity of 
stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low 
Dutch harpooneer in that ancient 
Greenland and Spitzbergen whale 
fishery. In the first place, the amount 
of butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese 
consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, 
though, to their naturally unctuous 
natures, being rendered still more 
unctuous by the nature of their 
vocation, and especially by their 
pursuing their game in those frigid 
Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that 
Esquimaux country where the convivial 
natives pledge each other in bumpers of 
train oil.

The quantity of beer, too, is very 
large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those 
polar fisheries could only be 
prosecuted in the short summer of that 
climate, so that the whole cruise of 
one of these Dutch whalemen, including 
the short voyage to and from the 
Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed 
three months, say, and reckoning 30 men 
to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we 
have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; 
therefore, I say, we have precisely two 
barrels of beer per man, for a twelve 
weeks’ allowance, exclusive of his fair 
proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. 
Now, whether these gin and beer 
harpooneers, so fuddled as one might 
fancy them to have been, were the right 
sort of men to stand up in a boat’s 
head, and take good aim at flying 
whales; this would seem somewhat 
improbable. Yet they did aim at them, 
and hit them too. But this was very far 
North, be it remembered, where beer 
agrees well with the constitution; upon 
the Equator, in our southern fishery, 
beer would be apt to make the 
harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and 
boozy in his boat; and grievous loss 
might ensue to Nantucket and New 
Bedford.

But no more; enough has been said to 
show that the old Dutch whalers of two 
or three centuries ago were high 
livers; and that the English whalers 
have not neglected so excellent an 
example. For, say they, when cruising 
in an empty ship, if you can get 
nothing better out of the world, get a 
good dinner out of it, at least. And 
this empties the decanter. 

 

CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.

Hitherto, in descriptively treating of 
the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt 
upon the marvels of his outer aspect; 
or separately and in detail upon some 
few interior structural features. But 
to a large and thorough sweeping 
comprehension of him, it behooves me 
now to unbutton him still further, and 
untagging the points of his hose, 
unbuckling his garters, and casting 
loose the hooks and the eyes of the 
joints of his innermost bones, set him 
before you in his ultimatum; that is to 
say, in his unconditional skeleton.

But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that 
you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, 
pretend to know aught about the 
subterranean parts of the whale? Did 
erudite Stubb, mounted upon your 
capstan, deliver lectures on the 
anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of 
the windlass, hold up a specimen rib 
for exhibition? Explain thyself, 
Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown 
whale on your deck for examination, as 
a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. 
A veritable witness have you hitherto 
been, Ishmael; but have a care how you 
seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the 
privilege of discoursing upon the 
joists and beams; the rafters, 
ridge-pole, sleepers, and 
under-pinnings, making up the 
frame-work of leviathan; and belike of 
the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, 
butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.

I confess, that since Jonah, few 
whalemen have penetrated very far 
beneath the skin of the adult whale; 
nevertheless, I have been blessed with 
an opportunity to dissect him in 
miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a 
small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily 
hoisted to the deck for his poke or 
bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of 
the harpoons, and for the heads of the 
lances. Think you I let that chance go, 
without using my boat-hatchet and 
jack-knife, and breaking the seal and 
reading all the contents of that young 
cub?

And as for my exact knowledge of the 
bones of the leviathan in their 
gigantic, full grown development, for 
that rare knowledge I am indebted to my 
late royal friend Tranquo, king of 
Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For 
being at Tranque, years ago, when 
attached to the trading-ship Dey of 
Algiers, I was invited to spend part of 
the Arsacidean holidays with the lord 
of Tranque, at his retired palm villa 
at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very 
far distant from what our sailors 
called Bamboo-Town, his capital.

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

Chief among these latter was a great 
Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually 
long raging gale, had been found dead 
and stranded, with his head against a 
cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, 
tufted droopings seemed his verdant 
jet. When the vast body had at last 
been stripped of its fathom-deep 
enfoldings, and the bones become dust 
dry in the sun, then the skeleton was 
carefully transported up the Pupella 
glen, where a grand temple of lordly 
palms now sheltered it.

The ribs were hung with trophies; the 
vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean 
annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in 
the skull, the priests kept up an 
unextinguished aromatic flame, so that 
the mystic head again sent forth its 
vapoury spout; while, suspended from a 
bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated 
over all the devotees, like the 
hair-hung sword that so affrighted 
Damocles.

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was 
green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the 
trees stood high and haughty, feeling 
their living sap; the industrious earth 
beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a 
gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the 
ground-vine tendrils formed the warp 
and woof, and the living flowers the 
figures. All the trees, with all their 
laden branches; all the shrubs, and 
ferns, and grasses; the 
message-carrying air; all these 
unceasingly were active. Through the 
lacings of the leaves, the great sun 
seemed a flying shuttle weaving the 
unwearied verdure. 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-god, he weaves; and by 
that weaving is he deafened, that he 
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.

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom 
of that Arsacidean wood, the great, 
white, worshipped skeleton lay 
lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet, as the 
ever-woven verdant warp and woof 
intermixed and hummed around him, the 
mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; 
himself all woven over with the vines; 
every month assuming greener, fresher 
verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life 
folded Death; Death trellised Life; the 
grim god wived with youthful Life, and 
begat him curly-headed glories.

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited 
this wondrous whale, and saw the skull 
an altar, and the artificial smoke 
ascending from where the real jet had 
issued, I marvelled that the king 
should regard a chapel as an object of 
vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled 
that the priests should swear that 
smoky jet of his was genuine. To and 
fro I paced before this 
skeleton—brushed the vines aside—broke 
through the ribs—and with a ball of 
Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long 
amid its many winding, shaded 
colonnades and arbours. But soon my 
line was out; and following it back, I 
emerged from the opening where I 
entered. I saw no living thing within; 
naught was there but bones.

Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I 
once more dived within the skeleton. 
From their arrow-slit in the skull, the 
priests perceived me taking the 
altitude of the final rib, “How now!” 
they shouted; “Dar’st thou measure this 
our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, 
priests—well, how long do ye make him, 
then?” But hereupon a fierce contest 
rose among them, concerning feet and 
inches; they cracked each other’s 
sconces with their yard-sticks—the 
great skull echoed—and seizing that 
lucky chance, I quickly concluded my 
own admeasurements.

These admeasurements I now propose to 
set before you. But first, be it 
recorded, that, in this matter, I am 
not free to utter any fancied 
measurement I please. Because there are 
skeleton authorities you can refer to, 
to test my accuracy. There is a 
Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in 
Hull, England, one of the whaling ports 
of that country, where they have some 
fine specimens of fin-backs and other 
whales. Likewise, I have heard that in 
the museum of Manchester, in New 
Hampshire, they have what the 
proprietors call “the only perfect 
specimen of a Greenland or River Whale 
in the United States.” Moreover, at a 
place in Yorkshire, England, Burton 
Constable by name, a certain Sir 
Clifford Constable has in his 
possession the skeleton of a Sperm 
Whale, but of moderate size, by no 
means of the full-grown magnitude of my 
friend King Tranquo’s.

In both cases, the stranded whales to 
which these two skeletons belonged, 
were originally claimed by their 
proprietors upon similar grounds. King 
Tranquo seizing his because he wanted 
it; and Sir Clifford, because he was 
lord of the seignories of those parts. 
Sir Clifford’s whale has been 
articulated throughout; so that, like a 
great chest of drawers, you can open 
and shut him, in all his bony 
cavities—spread out his ribs like a 
gigantic fan—and swing all day upon his 
lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon 
some of his trap-doors and shutters; 
and a footman will show round future 
visitors with a bunch of keys at his 
side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging 
twopence for a peep at the whispering 
gallery in the spinal column; 
threepence to hear the echo in the 
hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence 
for the unrivalled view from his 
forehead.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now 
proceed to set down are copied verbatim 
from my right arm, where I had them 
tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at 
that period, there was no other secure 
way of preserving such valuable 
statistics. But as I was crowded for 
space, and wished the other parts of my 
body to remain a blank page for a poem 
I was then composing—at least, what 
untattooed parts might remain—I did not 
trouble myself with the odd inches; 
nor, indeed, should inches at all enter 
into a congenial admeasurement of the 
whale. 

 

CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s 
Skeleton.

In the first place, I wish to lay 
before you a particular, plain 
statement, touching the living bulk of 
this leviathan, whose skeleton we are 
briefly to exhibit. Such a statement 
may prove useful here.

According to a careful calculation I 
have made, and which I partly base upon 
Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy 
tons for the largest sized Greenland 
whale of sixty feet in length; 
according to my careful calculation, I 
say, a Sperm Whale of the largest 
magnitude, between eighty-five and 
ninety feet in length, and something 
less than forty feet in its fullest 
circumference, such a whale will weigh 
at least ninety tons; so that, 
reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he 
would considerably outweigh the 
combined population of a whole village 
of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.

Think you not then that brains, like 
yoked cattle, should be put to this 
leviathan, to make him at all budge to 
any landsman’s imagination?

Having already in various ways put 
before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, 
teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers 
other parts, I shall now simply point 
out what is most interesting in the 
general bulk of his unobstructed bones. 
But as the colossal skull embraces so 
very large a proportion of the entire 
extent of the skeleton; as it is by far 
the most complicated part; and as 
nothing is to be repeated concerning it 
in this chapter, you must not fail to 
carry it in your mind, or under your 
arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will 
not gain a complete notion of the 
general structure we are about to view.

In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton 
at Tranque measured seventy-two Feet; 
so that when fully invested and 
extended in life, he must have been 
ninety feet long; for in the whale, the 
skeleton loses about one fifth in 
length compared with the living body. 
Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and 
jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving 
some fifty feet of plain back-bone. 
Attached to this back-bone, for 
something less than a third of its 
length, was the mighty circular basket 
of ribs which once enclosed his vitals.

To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, 
with the long, unrelieved spine, 
extending far away from it in a 
straight line, not a little resembled 
the hull of a great ship new-laid upon 
the stocks, when only some twenty of 
her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and 
the keel is otherwise, for the time, 
but a long, disconnected timber.

The ribs were ten on a side. The first, 
to begin from the neck, was nearly six 
feet long; the second, third, and 
fourth were each successively longer, 
till you came to the climax of the 
fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which 
measured eight feet and some inches. 
From that part, the remaining ribs 
diminished, till the tenth and last 
only spanned five feet and some inches. 
In general thickness, they all bore a 
seemly correspondence to their length. 
The middle ribs were the most arched. 
In some of the Arsacides they are used 
for beams whereon to lay footpath 
bridges over small streams.

In considering these ribs, I could not 
but be struck anew with the 
circumstance, so variously repeated in 
this book, that the skeleton of the 
whale is by no means the mould of his 
invested form. The largest of the 
Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, 
occupied that part of the fish which, 
in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the 
greatest depth of the invested body of 
this particular whale must have been at 
least sixteen feet; whereas, the 
corresponding rib measured but little 
more than eight feet. So that this rib 
only conveyed half of the true notion 
of the living magnitude of that part. 
Besides, for some way, where I now saw 
but a naked spine, all that had been 
once wrapped round with tons of added 
bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and 
bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, 
I here saw but a few disordered joints; 
and in place of the weighty and 
majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter 
blank!

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, 
for timid untravelled man to try to 
comprehend aright this wondrous whale, 
by merely poring over his dead 
attenuated skeleton, stretched in this 
peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of 
quickest perils; only when within the 
eddyings of his angry flukes; only on 
the profound unbounded sea, can the 
fully invested whale be truly and 
livingly found out.

But the spine. For that, the best way 
we can consider it is, with a crane, to 
pile its bones high up on end. No 
speedy enterprise. But now it’s done, 
it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar.

There are forty and odd vertebrae in 
all, which in the skeleton are not 
locked together. They mostly lie like 
the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic 
spire, forming solid courses of heavy 
masonry. The largest, a middle one, is 
in width something less than three 
feet, and in depth more than four. The 
smallest, where the spine tapers away 
into the tail, is only two inches in 
width, and looks something like a white 
billiard-ball. I was told that there 
were still smaller ones, but they had 
been lost by some little cannibal 
urchins, the priest’s children, who had 
stolen them to play marbles with. Thus 
we see how that the spine of even the 
hugest of living things tapers off at 
last into simple child’s play. 

 

CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.

From his mighty bulk the whale affords 
a most congenial theme whereon to 
enlarge, amplify, and generally 
expatiate. Would you, you could not 
compress him. By good rights he should 
only be treated of in imperial folio. 
Not to tell over again his furlongs 
from spiracle to tail, and the yards he 
measures about the waist; only think of 
the gigantic involutions of his 
intestines, where they lie in him like 
great cables and hawsers coiled away in 
the subterranean orlop-deck of a 
line-of-battle-ship.

Since I have undertaken to manhandle 
this Leviathan, it behooves me to 
approve myself omnisciently exhaustive 
in the enterprise; not overlooking the 
minutest seminal germs of his blood, 
and spinning him out to the uttermost 
coil of his bowels. Having already 
described him in most of his present 
habitatory and anatomical 
peculiarities, it now remains to 
magnify him in an archaeological, 
fossiliferous, and antediluvian point 
of view. Applied to any other creature 
than the Leviathan—to an ant or a 
flea—such portly terms might justly be 
deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But 
when Leviathan is the text, the case is 
altered. Fain am I to stagger to this 
emprise under the weightiest words of 
the dictionary. And here be it said, 
that whenever it has been convenient to 
consult one in the course of these 
dissertations, I have invariably used a 
huge quarto edition of Johnson, 
expressly purchased for that purpose; 
because that famous lexicographer’s 
uncommon personal bulk more fitted him 
to compile a lexicon to be used by a 
whale author like me.

One often hears of writers that rise 
and swell with their subject, though it 
may seem but an ordinary one. How, 
then, with me, writing of this 
Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography 
expands into placard capitals. Give me 
a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ 
crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold 
my arms! For in the mere act of penning 
my thoughts of this Leviathan, they 
weary me, and make me faint with their 
outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, 
as if to include the whole circle of 
the sciences, and all the generations 
of whales, and men, and mastodons, 
past, present, and to come, with all 
the revolving panoramas of empire on 
earth, and throughout the whole 
universe, not excluding its suburbs. 
Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue 
of a large and liberal theme! We expand 
to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, 
you must choose a mighty theme. No 
great and enduring volume can ever be 
written on the flea, though many there 
be who have tried it.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil 
Whales, I present my credentials as a 
geologist, by stating that in my 
miscellaneous time I have been a 
stone-mason, and also a great digger of 
ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, 
cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. 
Likewise, by way of preliminary, I 
desire to remind the reader, that while 
in the earlier geological strata there 
are found the fossils of monsters now 
almost completely extinct; the 
subsequent relics discovered in what 
are called the Tertiary formations seem 
the connecting, or at any rate 
intercepted links, between the 
antichronical creatures, and those 
whose remote posterity are said to have 
entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales 
hitherto discovered belong to the 
Tertiary period, which is the last 
preceding the superficial formations. 
And though none of them precisely 
answer to any known species of the 
present time, they are yet sufficiently 
akin to them in general respects, to 
justify their taking rank as Cetacean 
fossils.

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite 
whales, fragments of their bones and 
skeletons, have within thirty years 
past, at various intervals, been found 
at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, 
in France, in England, in Scotland, and 
in the States of Louisiana, 
Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the 
more curious of such remains is part of 
a skull, which in the year 1779 was 
disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in 
Paris, a short street opening almost 
directly upon the palace of the 
Tuileries; and bones disinterred in 
excavating the great docks of Antwerp, 
in Napoleon’s time. Cuvier pronounced 
these fragments to have belonged to 
some utterly unknown Leviathanic 
species.

But by far the most wonderful of all 
Cetacean relics was the almost complete 
vast skeleton of an extinct monster, 
found in the year 1842, on the 
plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. 
The awe-stricken credulous slaves in 
the vicinity took it for the bones of 
one of the fallen angels. The Alabama 
doctors declared it a huge reptile, and 
bestowed upon it the name of 
Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones 
of it being taken across the sea to 
Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned 
out that this alleged reptile was a 
whale, though of a departed species. A 
significant illustration of the fact, 
again and again repeated in this book, 
that the skeleton of the whale 
furnishes but little clue to the shape 
of his fully invested body. So Owen 
rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and 
in his paper read before the London 
Geological Society, pronounced it, in 
substance, one of the most 
extraordinary creatures which the 
mutations of the globe have blotted out 
of existence.

When I stand among these mighty 
Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, 
jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all 
characterized by partial resemblances 
to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; 
but at the same time bearing on the 
other hand similar affinities to the 
annihilated antichronical Leviathans, 
their incalculable seniors; I am, by a 
flood, borne back to that wondrous 
period, ere time itself can be said to 
have begun; for time began with man. 
Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, 
and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses 
into those Polar eternities; when 
wedged bastions of ice pressed hard 
upon what are now the Tropics; and in 
all the 25,000 miles of this world’s 
circumference, not an inhabitable 
hand’s breadth of land was visible. 
Then the whole world was the whale’s; 
and, king of creation, he left his wake 
along the present lines of the Andes 
and the Himmalehs. Who can show a 
pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon 
had shed older blood than the 
Pharaoh’s. Methuselah seems a 
school-boy. I look round to shake hands 
with Shem. I am horror-struck at this 
antemosaic, unsourced existence of the 
unspeakable terrors of the whale, 
which, having been before all time, 
must needs exist after all humane ages 
are over.

But not alone has this Leviathan left 
his pre-adamite traces in the 
stereotype plates of nature, and in 
limestone and marl bequeathed his 
ancient bust; but upon Egyptian 
tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim 
for them an almost fossiliferous 
character, we find the unmistakable 
print of his fin. In an apartment of 
the great temple of Denderah, some 
fifty years ago, there was discovered 
upon the granite ceiling a sculptured 
and painted planisphere, abounding in 
centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, 
similar to the grotesque figures on the 
celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding 
among them, old Leviathan swam as of 
yore; was there swimming in that 
planisphere, centuries before Solomon 
was cradled.

Nor must there be omitted another 
strange attestation of the antiquity of 
the whale, in his own osseous 
post-diluvian reality, as set down by 
the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary 
traveller.

“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a 
Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which 
are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of 
a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up 
dead upon that shore. The Common People 
imagine, that by a secret Power 
bestowed by God upon the temple, no 
Whale can pass it without immediate 
death. But the truth of the Matter is, 
that on either side of the Temple, 
there are Rocks that shoot two Miles 
into the Sea, and wound the Whales when 
they light upon ‘em. They keep a 
Whale’s Rib of an incredible length for 
a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground 
with its convex part uppermost, makes 
an Arch, the Head of which cannot be 
reached by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. 
This Rib (says John Leo) is said to 
have layn there a hundred Years before 
I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that 
a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, 
came from this Temple, and some do not 
stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas 
was cast forth by the Whale at the Base 
of the Temple.”

In this Afric Temple of the Whale I 
leave you, reader, and if you be a 
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will 
silently worship there. 

 

CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude 
Diminish?—Will He Perish?

Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes 
floundering down upon us from the 
head-waters of the Eternities, it may 
be fitly inquired, whether, in the long 
course of his generations, he has not 
degenerated from the original bulk of 
his sires.

But upon investigation we find, that 
not only are the whales of the present 
day superior in magnitude to those 
whose fossil remains are found in the 
Tertiary system (embracing a distinct 
geological period prior to man), but of 
the whales found in that Tertiary 
system, those belonging to its latter 
formations exceed in size those of its 
earlier ones.

Of all the pre-adamite whales yet 
exhumed, by far the largest is the 
Alabama one mentioned in the last 
chapter, and that was less than seventy 
feet in length in the skeleton. 
Whereas, we have already seen, that the 
tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for 
the skeleton of a large sized modern 
whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s 
authority, that Sperm Whales have been 
captured near a hundred feet long at 
the time of capture.

But may it not be, that while the 
whales of the present hour are an 
advance in magnitude upon those of all 
previous geological periods; may it not 
be, that since Adam’s time they have 
degenerated?

Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we 
are to credit the accounts of such 
gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient 
naturalists generally. For Pliny tells 
us of Whales that embraced acres of 
living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others 
which measured eight hundred feet in 
length—Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of 
Whales! And even in the days of Banks 
and Solander, Cooke’s naturalists, we 
find a Danish member of the Academy of 
Sciences setting down certain Iceland 
Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled 
Bellies) at one hundred and twenty 
yards; that is, three hundred and sixty 
feet. And Lacepede, the French 
naturalist, in his elaborate history of 
whales, in the very beginning of his 
work (page 3), sets down the Right 
Whale at one hundred metres, three 
hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this 
work was published so late as A.D. 1825.

But will any whaleman believe these 
stories? No. The whale of to-day is as 
big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. 
And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a 
whaleman (more than he was), will make 
bold to tell him so. Because I cannot 
understand how it is, that while the 
Egyptian mummies that were buried 
thousands of years before even Pliny 
was born, do not measure so much in 
their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in 
his socks; and while the cattle and 
other animals sculptured on the oldest 
Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the 
relative proportions in which they are 
drawn, just as plainly prove that the 
high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of 
Smithfield, not only equal, but far 
exceed in magnitude the fattest of 
Pharaoh’s fat kine; in the face of all 
this, I will not admit that of all 
animals the whale alone should have 
degenerated.

But still another inquiry remains; one 
often agitated by the more recondite 
Nantucketers. Whether owing to the 
almost omniscient look-outs at the 
mast-heads of the whaleships, now 
penetrating even through Behring’s 
straits, and into the remotest secret 
drawers and lockers of the world; and 
the thousand harpoons and lances darted 
along all continental coasts; the moot 
point is, whether Leviathan can long 
endure so wide a chase, and so 
remorseless a havoc; whether he must 
not at last be exterminated from the 
waters, and the last whale, like the 
last man, smoke his last pipe, and then 
himself evaporate in the final puff.

Comparing the humped herds of whales 
with the humped herds of buffalo, 
which, not forty years ago, overspread 
by tens of thousands the prairies of 
Illinois and Missouri, and shook their 
iron manes and scowled with their 
thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of 
populous river-capitals, where now the 
polite broker sells you land at a 
dollar an inch; in such a comparison an 
irresistible argument would seem 
furnished, to show that the hunted 
whale cannot now escape speedy 
extinction.

But you must look at this matter in 
every light. Though so short a period 
ago—not a good lifetime—the census of 
the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the 
census of men now in London, and though 
at the present day not one horn or hoof 
of them remains in all that region; and 
though the cause of this wondrous 
extermination was the spear of man; yet 
the far different nature of the 
whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so 
inglorious an end to the Leviathan. 
Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm 
Whales for forty-eight months think 
they have done extremely well, and 
thank God, if at last they carry home 
the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the 
days of the old Canadian and Indian 
hunters and trappers of the West, when 
the far west (in whose sunset suns 
still rise) was a wilderness and a 
virgin, the same number of moccasined 
men, for the same number of months, 
mounted on horse instead of sailing in 
ships, would have slain not forty, but 
forty thousand and more buffaloes; a 
fact that, if need were, could be 
statistically stated.

Nor, considered aright, does it seem 
any argument in favour of the gradual 
extinction of the Sperm Whale, for 
example, that in former years (the 
latter part of the last century, say) 
these Leviathans, in small pods, were 
encountered much oftener than at 
present, and, in consequence, the 
voyages were not so prolonged, and were 
also much more remunerative. Because, 
as has been elsewhere noticed, those 
whales, influenced by some views to 
safety, now swim the seas in immense 
caravans, so that to a large degree the 
scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, 
and schools of other days are now 
aggregated into vast but widely 
separated, unfrequent armies. That is 
all. And equally fallacious seems the 
conceit, that because the so-called 
whale-bone whales no longer haunt many 
grounds in former years abounding with 
them, hence that species also is 
declining. For they are only being 
driven from promontory to cape; and if 
one coast is no longer enlivened with 
their jets, then, be sure, some other 
and remoter strand has been very 
recently startled by the unfamiliar 
spectacle.

Furthermore: concerning these last 
mentioned Leviathans, they have two 
firm fortresses, which, in all human 
probability, will for ever remain 
impregnable. And as upon the invasion 
of their valleys, the frosty Swiss have 
retreated to their mountains; so, 
hunted from the savannas and glades of 
the middle seas, the whale-bone whales 
can at last resort to their Polar 
citadels, and diving under the ultimate 
glassy barriers and walls there, come 
up among icy fields and floes; and in a 
charmed circle of everlasting December, 
bid defiance to all pursuit from man.

But as perhaps fifty of these 
whale-bone whales are harpooned for one 
cachalot, some philosophers of the 
forecastle have concluded that this 
positive havoc has already very 
seriously diminished their battalions. 
But though for some time past a number 
of these whales, not less than 13,000, 
have been annually slain on the 
nor’-west coast by the Americans alone; 
yet there are considerations which 
render even this circumstance of little 
or no account as an opposing argument 
in this matter.

Natural as it is to be somewhat 
incredulous concerning the populousness 
of the more enormous creatures of the 
globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, 
the historian of Goa, when he tells us 
that at one hunting the King of Siam 
took 4,000 elephants; that in those 
regions elephants are numerous as 
droves of cattle in the temperate 
climes. And there seems no reason to 
doubt that if these elephants, which 
have now been hunted for thousands of 
years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by 
Hannibal, and by all the successive 
monarchs of the East—if they still 
survive there in great numbers, much 
more may the great whale outlast all 
hunting, since he has a pasture to 
expatiate in, which is precisely twice 
as large as all Asia, both Americas, 
Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all 
the Isles of the sea combined.

Moreover: we are to consider, that from 
the presumed great longevity of whales, 
their probably attaining the age of a 
century and more, therefore at any one 
period of time, several distinct adult 
generations must be contemporary. And 
what that is, we may soon gain some 
idea of, by imagining all the 
grave-yards, cemeteries, and family 
vaults of creation yielding up the live 
bodies of all the men, women, and 
children who were alive seventy-five 
years ago; and adding this countless 
host to the present human population of 
the globe.

Wherefore, for all these things, we 
account the whale immortal in his 
species, however perishable in his 
individuality. He swam the seas before 
the continents broke water; he once 
swam over the site of the Tuileries, 
and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In 
Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark; 
and if ever the world is to be again 
flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill 
off its rats, then the eternal whale 
will still survive, and rearing upon 
the topmost crest of the equatorial 
flood, spout his frothed defiance to 
the skies. 

 

CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.

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.

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, not to hint of this: that 
it is an inference from certain canonic 
teachings, that 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; not 
at all to hint of this, 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 a secret has been 
divulged, which perhaps might more 
properly, in set way, 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 bruited reason for this thing 
appeared by no means adequate; though, 
indeed, as touching all Ahab’s deeper 
part, every revelation partook more of 
significant darkness than of 
explanatory light. But, in the end, it 
all came out; this one matter did, at 
least. That direful mishap was at the 
bottom of his 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, so far as in them lay, to 
muffle up the knowledge of this thing 
from others; and hence it was, that not 
till a considerable interval had 
elapsed, did it transpire upon the 
Pequod’s decks.

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.

And when that functionary appeared 
before him, he bade him without delay 
set about making a new leg, and 
directed the mates to see him supplied 
with all the studs and joists of 
jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus 
far been accumulated on the voyage, in 
order that a careful selection of the 
stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might 
be secured. This done, the carpenter 
received orders to have the leg 
completed that night; and to provide 
all the fittings for it, independent of 
those pertaining to the distrusted one 
in use. Moreover, the ship’s forge was 
ordered to be hoisted out of its 
temporary idleness in the hold; and, to 
accelerate the affair, the blacksmith 
was commanded to proceed at once to the 
forging of whatever iron contrivances 
might be needed. 

 

CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.

Seat thyself sultanically among the 
moons of Saturn, and take high 
abstracted man alone; and he seems a 
wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from 
the same point, take mankind in mass, 
and for the most part, they seem a mob 
of unnecessary duplicates, both 
contemporary and hereditary. But most 
humble though he was, and far from 
furnishing an example of the high, 
humane abstraction; the Pequod’s 
carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he 
now comes in person on this stage.

Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and 
more especially those belonging to 
whaling vessels, he was, to a certain 
off-handed, practical extent, alike 
experienced in numerous trades and 
callings collateral to his own; the 
carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient 
and outbranching trunk of all those 
numerous handicrafts which more or less 
have to do with wood as an auxiliary 
material. But, besides the application 
to him of the generic remark above, 
this carpenter of the Pequod was 
singularly efficient in those thousand 
nameless mechanical emergencies 
continually recurring in a large ship, 
upon a three or four years’ voyage, in 
uncivilized and far-distant seas. For 
not to speak of his readiness in 
ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, 
sprung spars, reforming the shape of 
clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s 
eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in 
the side planks, and other 
miscellaneous matters more directly 
pertaining to his special business; he 
was moreover unhesitatingly expert in 
all manner of conflicting aptitudes, 
both useful and capricious.

The one grand stage where he enacted 
all his various parts so manifold, was 
his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous 
table furnished with several vices, of 
different sizes, and both of iron and 
of wood. At all times except when 
whales were alongside, this bench was 
securely lashed athwartships against 
the rear of the Try-works.

A belaying pin is found too large to be 
easily inserted into its hole: the 
carpenter claps it into one of his 
ever-ready vices, and straightway files 
it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange 
plumage strays on board, and is made a 
captive: out of clean shaved rods of 
right-whale bone, and cross-beams of 
sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes 
a pagoda-looking cage for it. An 
oarsman sprains his wrist: the 
carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. 
Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be 
painted upon the blade of his every 
oar; screwing each oar in his big vice 
of wood, the carpenter symmetrically 
supplies the constellation. A sailor 
takes a fancy to wear shark-bone 
ear-rings: the carpenter drills his 
ears. Another has the toothache: the 
carpenter out pincers, and clapping one 
hand upon his bench bids him be seated 
there; but the poor fellow unmanageably 
winces under the unconcluded operation; 
whirling round the handle of his wooden 
vice, the carpenter signs him to clap 
his jaw in that, if he would have him 
draw the tooth.

Thus, this carpenter was prepared at 
all points, and alike indifferent and 
without respect in all. 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. He was 
like one of those unreasoning but still 
highly useful, multum in parvo, 
Sheffield contrivances, assuming the 
exterior—though a little swelled—of a 
common pocket knife; but containing, 
not only blades of various sizes, but 
also screw-drivers, cork-screws, 
tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, 
nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his 
superiors wanted to use the carpenter 
for a screw-driver, all they had to do 
was to open that part of him, and the 
screw was fast: or if for tweezers, 
take him up by the legs, and there they 
were.

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. 

 

CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter. 
The Deck—First Night Watch.

(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, now, 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). 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 carpenter 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 be forging the buckle-screw, 
sir, now.

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! This must be the remainder 
the Greek made the Africans of. 
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. Imprimis, 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? 
(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. I am so rich, I could have given 
bid for bid with the wealthiest 
Praetorians at the auction of the Roman 
empire (which was the world’s); and yet 
I owe for the flesh in the tongue I 
brag with. By heavens! I’ll get a 
crucible, and into it, and dissolve 
myself down to one small, compendious 
vertebra. So.

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 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the 
Cabin.

According to usage they were pumping 
the ship 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.*

*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—Niphon, 
Matsmai, and Sikoke. 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 and break out.”

“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.”

“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!” 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 Burton, and 
break out in the main-hold.”

It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly 
why it was, that as respecting 
Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have 
been a flash of honesty in him; or mere 
prudential policy which, under the 
circumstance, imperiously forbade the 
slightest symptom of open disaffection, 
however transient, in the important 
chief officer of his ship. However it 
was, his orders were executed; and the 
Burtons were hoisted. 

 

CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.

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, with copies of the posted 
placards, vainly warning the infatuated 
old world from the flood. Tierce after 
tierce, too, of water, and bread, and 
beef, and shooks of 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 them 
then.

Now, at this time it was that my poor 
pagan companion, and fast bosom-friend, 
Queequeg, was seized with a fever, 
which brought him nigh to his endless 
end.

Be it said, that 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 green 
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. 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 you as you sat 
by the side of this waning savage, and 
saw as strange things in his face, as 
any beheld who were bystanders when 
Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly 
wondrous and fearful in man, never yet 
was put into words or books. And the 
drawing near of Death, which alike 
levels all, alike impresses all with a 
last revelation, which only an author 
from the dead could adequately tell. 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 
one to him in the grey morning watch, 
when the day was just breaking, and 
taking his hand, said that while in 
Nantucket he had chanced to see certain 
little canoes of dark wood, like the 
rich war-wood of his native isle; and 
upon inquiry, he had learned that all 
whalemen who died in Nantucket, were 
laid in those same dark canoes, and 
that the fancy of being so laid had 
much pleased him; for it was not unlike 
the custom of his own race, who, after 
embalming a dead warrior, stretched him 
out in his canoe, and so left him to be 
floated away to the starry 
archipelagoes; for not only do they 
believe that the stars are isles, but 
that far beyond all visible horizons, 
their own mild, uncontinented seas, 
interflow with the blue heavens; and so 
form the white breakers of the milky 
way. He added, that he shuddered at the 
thought of being buried in his hammock, 
according to the usual sea-custom, 
tossed like something vile to the 
death-devouring sharks. No: he desired 
a canoe like those of Nantucket, all 
the more congenial to him, being a 
whaleman, that like a whale-boat these 
coffin-canoes were without a keel; 
though that involved but uncertain 
steering, and much lee-way adown the 
dim ages.

Now, when this strange circumstance was 
made known aft, the carpenter was at 
once commanded to do Queequeg’s 
bidding, whatever it might include. 
There was some heathenish, 
coffin-coloured old lumber aboard, 
which, upon a long previous voyage, had 
been cut from the aboriginal groves of 
the Lackaday islands, 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 Long Island sailor.

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

When the last nail was driven, and the 
lid duly planed and fitted, he 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. All by his own 
request, also, 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 slily 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 General 
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 base little Pip, he died a 
coward; died all a’shiver;—out upon 
Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all 
the Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, 
a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped 
from a whale-boat! I’d never beat my 
tambourine over base Pip, and hail him 
General, 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 just recalled a 
little duty ashore, which he was 
leaving undone; and therefore had 
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, 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.

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 with all 
manner of grotesque figures and 
drawings; and it seemed that hereby he 
was striving, in his rude way, to copy 
parts of the twisted tattooing on his 
body. And 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 were therefore destined in 
the end to moulder away with the living 
parchment whereon they were inscribed, 
and so be unsolved to the last. And 
this thought it must have been which 
suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation 
of his, when one morning turning away 
from surveying poor Queequeg—“Oh, 
devilish tantalization of the gods!” 

 

CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.

When gliding by the Bashee isles we 
emerged at last upon the great South 
Sea; were it not for other things, I 
could have greeted my dear Pacific with 
uncounted thanks, for now the long 
supplication of my youth was answered; 
that serene ocean rolled eastwards from 
me a thousand leagues of blue.

There is, one knows not what sweet 
mystery about this sea, whose gently 
awful stirrings seem to speak of some 
hidden soul beneath; like those fabled 
undulations of the Ephesian sod over 
the buried Evangelist St. John. And 
meet it is, that over these 
sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery 
prairies and Potters’ Fields of all 
four continents, the waves should rise 
and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; 
for here, millions of mixed shades and 
shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, 
reveries; all that we call lives and 
souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; 
tossing like slumberers in their beds; 
the ever-rolling waves but made so by 
their restlessness.

To any meditative Magian rover, this 
serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever 
after be the sea of his adoption. It 
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, divine Pacific 
zones the world’s whole bulk about; 
makes all coasts one bay to it; seems 
the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted 
by those eternal swells, you needs must 
own the seductive god, bowing your head 
to Pan.

But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s 
brain, as standing like an iron statue 
at his accustomed place beside the 
mizen rigging, with one nostril he 
unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk 
from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet 
woods mild lovers must be walking), and 
with the other consciously inhaled the 
salt breath of the new found sea; that 
sea in which the hated White Whale must 
even then be swimming. Launched at 
length upon these almost final waters, 
and gliding towards the Japanese 
cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose 
intensified itself. His firm lips met 
like the lips of a vice; the Delta of 
his forehead’s veins swelled like 
overladen brooks; in his very sleep, 
his ringing cry ran through the vaulted 
hull, “Stern all! the White Whale 
spouts thick blood!” 

 

CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.

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, daughter-like, 
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! 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.

Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst 
thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst 
thou taken this old blacksmith to 
thyself ere his full ruin came upon 
him, then had the young widow had a 
delicious grief, and her orphans a 
truly venerable, legendary sire to 
dream of in their after years; and all 
of them a care-killing competency. But 
Death plucked down some virtuous elder 
brother, on whose whistling daily toil 
solely hung the responsibilities of 
some other family, and left the worse 
than useless old man standing, till the 
hideous rot of life should make him 
easier to harvest.

Why tell the whole? The blows of the 
basement hammer every day grew more and 
more between; and each blow every day 
grew fainter than the last; the wife 
sat frozen at the window, with tearless 
eyes, glitteringly gazing into the 
weeping faces of her children; the 
bellows fell; the forge choked up with 
cinders; the house was sold; the mother 
dived down into the long church-yard 
grass; her children twice followed her 
thither; and the houseless, familyless 
old man staggered off a vagabond in 
crape; his every woe unreverenced; his 
grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!

Death seems the only desirable sequel 
for a career like this; but Death is 
only a launching into the region of the 
strange Untried; it is but the first 
salutation to the possibilities of the 
immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, 
the Unshored; therefore, to the 
death-longing eyes of such men, who 
still have left in them some interior 
compunctions against suicide, does the 
all-contributed and all-receptive ocean 
alluringly spread forth his whole plain 
of unimaginable, taking terrors, and 
wonderful, new-life adventures; and 
from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, 
the thousand mermaids sing to 
them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here 
is another life without the guilt of 
intermediate death; here are wonders 
supernatural, without dying for them. 
Come hither! bury thyself in a life 
which, to your now equally abhorred and 
abhorring, landed world, is more 
oblivious than death. Come hither! put 
up thy gravestone, too, within the 
churchyard, and come hither, till we 
marry thee!”

Hearkening to these voices, East and 
West, by early sunrise, and by fall of 
eve, the blacksmith’s soul responded, 
Aye, I come! And so Perth went 
a-whaling. 

 

CHAPTER 113. The Forge.

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. 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, 
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.”

“Because I am scorched all over, 
Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting 
for a moment on his hammer; “I am past 
scorching; not easily can’st 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 
can’st thou endure without being mad? 
Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou 
can’st not go mad?—What wert thou 
making there?”

“Welding an old pike-head, sir; there 
were seams and dents in it.”

“And can’st thou make it all smooth 
again, blacksmith, after such hard 
usage as it had?”

“I think so, sir.”

“And I suppose thou can’st smoothe 
almost any seams and dents; never mind 
how hard the metal, blacksmith?”

“Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and 
dents but one.”

“Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, 
passionately advancing, and leaning 
with both hands on Perth’s shoulders; 
“look ye here—here—can ye smoothe out a 
seam like this, blacksmith,” sweeping 
one hand across his ribbed brow; “if 
thou could’st, blacksmith, glad enough 
would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and 
feel thy heaviest hammer between my 
eyes. Answer! Can’st thou smoothe this 
seam?”

“Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not 
all seams and dents but one?”

“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, 
man, it is unsmoothable; for though 
thou only see’st it here in my flesh, 
it has worked down into the bone of my 
skull—that is all wrinkles! But, away 
with child’s play; no more gaffs and 
pikes to-day. Look ye 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, then, 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, and the hard 
pressed forge shooting up its intense 
straight flame, the Parsee passed 
silently, and bowing over his head 
towards the fire, seemed invoking some 
curse or some blessing on the toil. 
But, as 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 fusee; 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 near by, 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 the heathen flesh, and the White 
Whale’s barbs were then tempered.

“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, 
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 114. The Gilder.

Penetrating further and further into 
the heart of the Japanese cruising 
ground, the Pequod was soon all astir 
in the fishery. Often, in mild, 
pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, 
eighteen, and twenty hours on the 
stretch, they were engaged in the 
boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or 
paddling after the whales, or for an 
interlude of sixty or seventy minutes 
calmly awaiting their uprising; though 
with but small success for their pains.

At such times, under an abated sun; 
afloat all day upon smooth, slow 
heaving swells; seated in his boat, 
light as a birch canoe; and so sociably 
mixing with the soft waves themselves, 
that like hearth-stone cats they purr 
against the gunwale; 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.

These are the times, when in his 
whale-boat the rover softly feels a 
certain filial, confident, land-like 
feeling towards the sea; that he 
regards it as so much flowery earth; 
and the distant ship revealing only the 
tops of her masts, seems struggling 
forward, not through high rolling 
waves, but through the tall grass of a 
rolling prairie: as when the western 
emigrants’ horses only show their 
erected ears, while their hidden bodies 
widely wade through the amazing verdure.

The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild 
blue hill-sides; as over these there 
steals the hush, the hum; you almost 
swear that play-wearied children lie 
sleeping in these solitudes, in some 
glad May-time, when the flowers of the 
woods are plucked. And all this mixes 
with your most mystic mood; so that 
fact and fancy, half-way meeting, 
interpenetrate, and form one seamless 
whole.

Nor did such soothing scenes, however 
temporary, fail of at least as 
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if 
these secret golden keys did seem to 
open in him his own secret golden 
treasuries, yet did his breath upon 
them prove but tarnishing.

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 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, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, 
adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), 
then scepticism, then disbelief, 
resting at last in manhood’s pondering 
repose of If. But once gone through, we 
trace the round again; and are infants, 
boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where 
lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor 
no more? In what rapt ether sails the 
world, of which the weariest will never 
weary? Where 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.

And that same day, too, gazing far down 
from his boat’s side into that same 
golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover 
saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me 
not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy 
kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith 
oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I 
look deep down and do believe.”

And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling 
scales, leaped up in that same golden 
light:—

“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; 
but here Stubb takes oaths that he has 
always been jolly!” 

 

CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The 
Bachelor.

And jolly enough were the sights and 
the sounds that came bearing down 
before the wind, some few weeks after 
Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.

It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, 
which had just wedged in her last cask 
of oil, and bolted down her bursting 
hatches; and now, in glad holiday 
apparel, was joyously, though somewhat 
vain-gloriously, sailing round among 
the widely-separated ships on the 
ground, previous to pointing her prow 
for home.

The three men at her mast-head wore 
long streamers of narrow red bunting at 
their hats; from the stern, a 
whale-boat was suspended, bottom down; 
and hanging captive from the bowsprit 
was seen the long lower jaw of the last 
whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, 
and jacks of all colours were flying 
from her rigging, on every side. 
Sideways lashed in each of her three 
basketed tops were two barrels of 
sperm; above which, in her top-mast 
cross-trees, you saw slender breakers 
of the same precious fluid; and nailed 
to her main truck was a brazen lamp.

As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor 
had met with the most surprising 
success; all the more wonderful, for 
that while cruising in the same seas 
numerous other vessels had gone entire 
months without securing a single fish. 
Not only had barrels of beef and bread 
been given away to make room for the 
far more valuable sperm, but additional 
supplemental casks had been bartered 
for, from the ships she had met; and 
these were stowed along the deck, and 
in the captain’s and officers’ 
state-rooms. Even the cabin table 
itself had been knocked into 
kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined 
off the broad head of an oil-butt, 
lashed down to the floor for a 
centrepiece. In the forecastle, the 
sailors had actually caulked and 
pitched their chests, and filled them; 
it was humorously added, that the cook 
had clapped a head on his largest 
boiler, and filled it; that the steward 
had plugged his spare coffee-pot and 
filled it; that the harpooneers had 
headed the sockets of their irons and 
filled them; that indeed everything was 
filled with sperm, except the captain’s 
pantaloons pockets, and those he 
reserved to thrust his hands into, in 
self-complacent testimony of his entire 
satisfaction.

As this glad ship of good luck bore 
down upon the moody Pequod, the 
barbarian sound of enormous drums came 
from her forecastle; and drawing still 
nearer, a crowd of her men were seen 
standing round her huge try-pots, 
which, covered with the parchment-like 
poke or stomach skin of the black fish, 
gave forth a loud roar to every stroke 
of the clenched hands of the crew. On 
the quarter-deck, the mates and 
harpooneers were dancing with the 
olive-hued girls who had eloped with 
them from the Polynesian Isles; while 
suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly 
secured aloft between the foremast and 
mainmast, three Long Island negroes, 
with glittering fiddle-bows of whale 
ivory, were presiding over the 
hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the 
ship’s company were tumultuously busy 
at the masonry of the try-works, from 
which the huge pots had been removed. 
You would have almost thought they were 
pulling down the cursed Bastille, such 
wild cries they raised, as the now 
useless brick and mortar were being 
hurled into the sea.

Lord and master over all this scene, 
the captain stood erect on the ship’s 
elevated quarter-deck, so that the 
whole rejoicing drama was full before 
him, and seemed merely contrived for 
his own individual diversion.

And Ahab, he too was standing on his 
quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with a 
stubborn gloom; and as the two ships 
crossed each other’s wakes—one all 
jubilations for things passed, the 
other all forebodings as to things to 
come—their two captains in themselves 
impersonated the whole striking 
contrast of the scene.

“Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the 
gay Bachelor’s commander, lifting a 
glass and a bottle in the air.

“Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted 
Ahab in reply.

“No; only heard of him; but don’t 
believe in him at all,” said the other 
good-humoredly. “Come aboard!”

“Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. 
Hast lost any men?”

“Not enough to speak of—two islanders, 
that’s all;—but come aboard, old 
hearty, come along. I’ll soon take that 
black from your brow. Come along, will 
ye (merry’s the play); a full ship and 
homeward-bound.”

“How wondrous familiar is a fool!” 
muttered Ahab; then aloud, “Thou art a 
full ship and homeward bound, thou 
sayst; well, then, call me an empty 
ship, and outward-bound. So go thy 
ways, and I will mine. Forward there! 
Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!”

And thus, while the one ship went 
cheerily before the breeze, the other 
stubbornly fought against it; and so 
the two vessels parted; the crew of the 
Pequod looking with grave, lingering 
glances towards the receding Bachelor; 
but the Bachelor’s men never heeding 
their gaze for the lively revelry they 
were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the 
taffrail, eyed the homewardbound craft, 
he took from his pocket a small vial of 
sand, and then looking from the ship to 
the vial, seemed thereby bringing two 
remote associations together, for that 
vial was filled with Nantucket 
soundings. 

 

CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.

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 encountering 
the gay Bachelor, 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 Hindoo 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 
water 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!” 

 

CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.

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, old 
man, that neither hearse nor coffin can 
be thine?”

“And who are hearsed that die on the 
sea?”

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

“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, old man.”

“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,” said 
the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like 
fire-flies in the gloom—“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 118. The Quadrant.

The season for the Line at length drew 
near; and every day when Ahab, coming 
from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, 
the vigilant helmsman would 
ostentatiously handle his spokes, and 
the eager mariners quickly run to the 
braces, and would stand there with all 
their eyes centrally fixed on the 
nailed doubloon; impatient for the 
order to point the ship’s prow for the 
equator. 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, 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. The 
sky looks lacquered; clouds there are 
none; the horizon floats; and this 
nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as 
the insufferable splendors of God’s 
throne. Well that Ahab’s quadrant was 
furnished with coloured glasses, 
through which to take sight of that 
solar fire. So, 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. These eyes of mine look 
into the very eye that is even now 
beholding him; aye, and into the eye 
that is even now equally beholding the 
objects on the unknown, thither side of 
thee, thou sun!”

Then gazing at his quadrant, and 
handling, one after the other, its 
numerous cabalistical contrivances, he 
pondered again, and muttered: “Foolish 
toy! babies’ plaything of haughty 
Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; 
the world brags of thee, of thy cunning 
and might; but what after all canst 
thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful 
point, where thou thyself happenest to 
be on this wide planet, and the hand 
that holds thee: no! not one jot more! 
Thou canst not tell where one drop of 
water or one grain of sand will be 
to-morrow noon; and yet with thy 
impotence thou insultest the sun! 
Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and 
cursed be all the things that cast 
man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose 
live vividness but scorches him, as 
these old eyes are even now scorched 
with thy light, O sun! Level by nature 
to this earth’s horizon are the glances 
of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown 
of his head, as if God had meant him to 
gaze on his firmament. 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 deadreckoning, 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 with his live and dead 
feet, a sneering triumph that seemed 
meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic 
despair that seemed meant for 
himself—these passed over the mute, 
motionless Parsee’s face. Unobserved he 
rose and glided away; while, awestruck 
by the aspect of their commander, the 
seamen clustered together on the 
forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly 
pacing the deck, shouted out—“To the 
braces! Up helm!—square in!”

In an instant the yards swung round; 
and as the ship half-wheeled upon her 
heel, her three firm-seated graceful 
masts erectly poised upon her long, 
ribbed hull, seemed as the three 
Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient 
steed.

Standing between the knight-heads, 
Starbuck watched the Pequod’s 
tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he 
went lurching along the deck.

“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, “but sea-coal 
ashes—mind ye that, Mr. 
Starbuck—sea-coal, not your common 
charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab 
mutter, ‘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 thou 
actest right; live in the game, and die 
in it!” 

 

CHAPTER 119. The Candles.

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, it is, that 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 upon a dazed and 
sleepy town.

Towards evening of that day, the Pequod 
was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled 
was left to fight a Typhoon which had 
struck her directly ahead. When 
darkness came on, sky and sea roared 
and split with the thunder, and blazed 
with the lightning, that showed the 
disabled masts fluttering here and 
there with the rags which the first 
fury of the tempest had left for its 
after sport.

Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was 
standing on the quarter-deck; at every 
flash of the lightning glancing aloft, 
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 sing ye the doxology 
for a wind-up.”

“Madman! look through my eyes if thou 
hast none of thine own.”

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

“Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb 
by the shoulder, and pointing his hand 
towards the weather bow, “markest thou 
not that the gale comes from the 
eastward, the very course Ahab is to 
run for Moby Dick? the very course he 
swung to this day noon? now mark his 
boat there; where is that stove? In the 
stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to 
stand—his stand-point is stove, man! 
Now jump overboard, and sing away, if 
thou must!

“I don’t half understand ye: what’s in 
the wind?”

“Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope 
is the shortest way to Nantucket,” 
soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, 
heedless of Stubb’s question. “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 Himmalehs 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 wax tapers before an 
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 Upharsin” has been 
woven into the shrouds and the cordage.

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, the gigantic 
jet negro, Daggoo, 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.”

“No, no, it wasn’t; I said the 
corpusants have mercy on us all; and I 
hope they will, still. But do they only 
have mercy on long faces?—have they no 
bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. 
Starbuck—but it’s too dark to look. 
Hear me, then: I take that mast-head 
flame we saw for a sign of good luck; 
for those masts are rooted in a hold 
that is going to be chock a’ block with 
sperm-oil, d’ye see; and so, all that 
sperm will work up into the masts, like 
sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts 
will yet be as three spermaceti 
candles—that’s the good promise we saw.”

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, like the 
standing, or stepping, or running 
skeletons in Herculaneum, others 
remained rooted to the deck; but all 
their 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! Yet blindfold, 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! The javelins cease; open 
eyes; see, or not? There burn the 
flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do 
glory in my genealogy. But 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 one forged at 
Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed in 
its conspicuous crotch, so that it 
projected beyond his whale-boat’s bow; 
but the sea that had stove its bottom 
had caused the loose leather sheath to 
drop off; and from the keen steel barb 
there now came a levelled flame of 
pale, forked fire. As the silent 
harpoon burned there like a serpent’s 
tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the 
arm—“God, God is against thee, old man; 
forbear! ‘tis an ill voyage! ill begun, 
ill continued; let me square the yards, 
while we may, old man, and make a fair 
wind of it homewards, to go on a better 
voyage than this.”

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. Petrified by his aspect, 
and still more shrinking from the fiery 
dart that he held, the men fell back in 
dismay, and Ahab again spoke:—

“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 in the hurricane that sweeps the 
plain, men fly the neighborhood of some 
lone, gigantic elm, whose very height 
and strength but render it so much the 
more unsafe, because so much the more a 
mark for thunderbolts; so at those last 
words of Ahab’s many of the mariners 
did run from him in a terror of dismay. 

 

CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End 
of the First Night Watch. Ahab standing 
by the helm. Starbuck approaching him.

“We must send down the main-top-sail 
yard, sir. The band is working loose 
and the lee lift is half-stranded. 
Shall I strike it, sir?”

“Strike nothing; lash it. If I had 
sky-sail poles, I’d sway them up now.”

“Sir!—in God’s name!—sir?”

“Well.”

“The anchors are working, sir. Shall I 
get them inboard?”

“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but 
lash everything. The wind rises, but it 
has not got up to my table-lands yet. 
Quick, and see to it.—By masts and 
keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed 
skipper of some coasting smack. Send 
down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, 
gluepots! Loftiest trucks were made for 
wildest winds, and this brain-truck of 
mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. 
Shall I strike that? Oh, none but 
cowards send down their brain-trucks in 
tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft 
there! I would e’en take it for 
sublime, did I not know that the colic 
is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, 
take medicine!” 

 

CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle 
Bulwarks.

Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and 
passing additional lashings over the 
anchors there hanging.

“No, Stubb; you may pound that knot 
there as much as you please, but you 
will never pound into me what you were 
just now saying. And how long ago is it 
since you said the very contrary? 
Didn’t you once say that whatever ship 
Ahab sails in, that ship should pay 
something extra on its insurance 
policy, just as though it were loaded 
with powder barrels aft and boxes of 
lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn’t you 
say so?”

“Well, suppose I did? What then? I’ve 
part changed my flesh since that time, 
why not my mind? Besides, supposing we 
are loaded with powder barrels aft and 
lucifers forward; how the devil could 
the lucifers get afire in this 
drenching spray here? Why, my little 
man, you have pretty red hair, but you 
couldn’t get afire now. Shake yourself; 
you’re Aquarius, or the water-bearer, 
Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat 
collar. Don’t you see, then, that for 
these extra risks the Marine Insurance 
companies have extra guarantees? Here 
are hydrants, Flask. But hark, again, 
and I’ll answer ye the other thing. 
First take your leg off from the crown 
of the anchor here, though, so I can 
pass the rope; now listen. What’s the 
mighty difference between holding a 
mast’s lightning-rod in the storm, and 
standing close by a mast that hasn’t 
got any lightning-rod at all in a 
storm? Don’t you see, you timber-head, 
that no harm can come to the holder of 
the rod, unless the mast is first 
struck? What are you talking about, 
then? Not one ship in a hundred carries 
rods, and Ahab,—aye, man, and all of 
us,—were in no more danger then, in my 
poor opinion, than all the crews in ten 
thousand ships now sailing the seas. 
Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you 
would have every man in the world go 
about with a small lightning-rod 
running up the corner of his hat, like 
a militia officer’s skewered feather, 
and trailing behind like his sash. Why 
don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy 
to be sensible; why don’t ye, then? any 
man with half an eye can be sensible.”

“I don’t know that, Stubb. You 
sometimes find it rather hard.”

“Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, 
it’s hard to be sensible, that’s a 
fact. And I am about drenched with this 
spray. Never mind; catch the turn 
there, and pass it. Seems to me we are 
lashing down these anchors now as if 
they were never going to be used again. 
Tying these two anchors here, Flask, 
seems like tying a man’s hands behind 
him. And what big generous hands they 
are, to be sure. These are your iron 
fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! 
I wonder, Flask, whether the world is 
anchored anywhere; if she is, she 
swings with an uncommon long cable, 
though. There, hammer that knot down, 
and we’ve done. So; next to touching 
land, lighting on deck is the most 
satisfactory. I say, just wring out my 
jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They 
laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems 
to me, a Long tailed coat ought always 
to be worn in all storms afloat. The 
tails tapering down that way, serve to 
carry off the water, d’ye see. Same 
with cocked hats; the cocks form 
gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more 
monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I 
must mount a swallow-tail, and drive 
down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there 
goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, 
Lord, that the winds that come from 
heaven should be so unmannerly! This is 
a nasty night, lad.” 

 

CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder 
and Lightning.

The main-top-sail yard.—Tashtego 
passing new lashings around it.

“Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty 
too much thunder up here. What’s the 
use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t 
want thunder; we want rum; give us a 
glass of rum. Um, um, um!” 

 

CHAPTER 123. The Musket.

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 
now bent and reefed, and a 
storm-trysail was set further aft; so 
that the ship soon went through the 
water with some precision again; and 
the course—for the present, 
East-south-east—which he was to steer, 
if practicable, was once more given to 
the helmsman. For 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, cheerly 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 blent 
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 wilful murderer of thirty men and 
more, if this ship come to any deadly 
harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul 
swears this ship will, if Ahab have his 
way. If, then, 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; 
he would be more hideous than a caged 
tiger, then. 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. What, 
then, 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!—boy! 
boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to 
death, old man, who can tell to what 
unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this 
day week may sink, with all the crew! 
Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? 
shall I?—The wind has gone down and 
shifted, sir; the fore and main 
topsails are reefed and set; she heads 
her course.”

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

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

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.

“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 124. 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 
tetering 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 thunder 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—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 subtile 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 
thunder turned old Ahab’s needles; but 
out of this bit of steel Ahab can make 
one of his own, that will point as true 
as any.”

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, is uncertain—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 125. The Log and 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 upon the 
customary slate 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 and angular log attached 
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.”

“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. 
Ho! there’s his arm just breaking 
water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it 
off—we haul in no cowards here. 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, 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 man should be a 
thing for immortal souls to sieve 
through! Who art thou, boy?”

“Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, 
dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred 
pounds of clay reward for Pip; five 
feet high—looks cowardly—quickest known 
by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen 
Pip the coward?”

“There can be no hearts above the 
snow-line. 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! 
This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; 
something that weak souls may hold by. 
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.”

“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I 
should thereby drag thee to worse 
horrors than are here. Come, then, to 
my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all 
goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! 
see the omniscient gods oblivious of 
suffering man; and man, though idiotic, 
and knowing not what he does, yet full 
of the sweet things of love and 
gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading 
thee by thy black hand, than though I 
grasped an Emperor’s!”

“There go two daft ones now,” muttered 
the old Manxman. “One daft with 
strength, the other daft with weakness. 
But here’s the end of the rotten 
line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I 
think we had best have a new line 
altogether. I’ll see Mr. Stubb about 
it.” 

 

CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.

Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s 
levelled steel, and her progress solely 
determined by Ahab’s level 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 
or civilized 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 that were 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. He 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.

But the bodings of the crew were 
destined to receive a most plausible 
confirmation in the fate of one of 
their number that morning. At sun-rise 
this man went from his hammock to his 
mast-head at the fore; and whether it 
was that he was not yet half waked from 
his sleep (for sailors sometimes go 
aloft in a transition state), whether 
it was thus with the man, there is now 
no telling; but, be that as it may, he 
had not been long at his perch, when a 
cry was heard—a cry and a rushing—and 
looking up, they saw a falling phantom 
in the air; and looking down, a little 
tossed heap of white bubbles in the 
blue of the sea.

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, 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 the sailor 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 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.

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 
inuendoes 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 baulks. 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. Are all my pains to go for 
nothing with that coffin? And now I’m 
ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It’s 
like turning an old coat; going to 
bring the flesh on the other side now. 
I don’t like this cobbling sort of 
business—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, 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. It’s the old woman’s tricks to be 
giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an 
affection all old women have for 
tinkers. I know an old woman of 
sixty-five who ran away with a 
bald-headed young tinker once. And 
that’s the reason I never would work 
for lonely widow old women ashore, when 
I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; 
they might have taken it into their 
lonely old heads to run off with me. 
But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea 
but snow-caps. 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, now, 
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. We workers in woods make 
bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as 
well as coffins and hearses. We work by 
the month, or by the job, or by the 
profit; not for us to ask the why and 
wherefore of our work, unless it be too 
confounded cobbling, and then we stash 
it if we can. Hem! I’ll do the job, 
now, tenderly. 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. Then, 
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.” 

 

CHAPTER 127. The Deck.

The coffin 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 following 
him.

“Back, lad; I will be with ye again 
presently. He goes! Not this hand 
complies with my humor more genially 
than that boy.—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, sir, for that; but 
the reason why 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 Gallipagos, 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 of 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; I do suck most wondrous 
philosophies from thee! Some unknown 
conduits from the unknown worlds must 
empty into thee!” 

 

CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The 
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 pick up her three far 
to windward boats—ere going in quest of 
the fourth one in the precisely 
opposite direction—the ship had not 
only been necessitated to leave that 
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 
ones 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. “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, 
last night,” said the old Manx sailor 
standing behind them; “I heard; all of 
ye heard their spirits.”

Now, as it shortly turned out, what 
made this incident of the Rachel’s the 
more melancholy, was the circumstance, 
that not only was one of the Captain’s 
sons among the number of the missing 
boat’s crew; but among the number of 
the other boat’s crews, at the same 
time, but on the other hand, separated 
from the ship during the dark 
vicissitudes of the chase, there had 
been still another son; as that for a 
time, the wretched father was plunged 
to the bottom of the cruellest 
perplexity; which was only solved for 
him by his chief mate’s instinctively 
adopting the ordinary procedure of a 
whale-ship in such emergencies, that 
is, when placed between jeopardized but 
divided boats, always to pick up the 
majority first. But 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 one yet 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 
race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, 
that Nantucket captains will send a son 
of such tender age away from them, for 
a protracted three or four years’ 
voyage in some other ship than their 
own; so that their first knowledge of a 
whaleman’s career shall be unenervated 
by any chance display of a father’s 
natural but untimely partiality, or 
undue apprehensiveness and concern.

Meantime, now the stranger 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. 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, however 
small, on the sea. 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; while 
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 that so wept with spray, 
still remained without comfort. She was 
Rachel, weeping for her children, 
because they were not. 

 

CHAPTER 129. The 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.”

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

“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once 
desert poor little Pip, whose drowned 
bones now show white, for all the 
blackness of his living skin. 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 master, master, master!

“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?—a little negro lad, five feet 
high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! 
Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen 
him? No! Well then, fill up again, 
captains, and let’s drink shame upon 
all cowards! I name no names. Shame 
upon them! Put one foot upon the table. 
Shame upon all cowards.—Hist! above 
there, I hear ivory—Oh, master! master! 
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.” 

 

CHAPTER 130. The Hat.

And now that at the proper time and 
place, after so long and wide a 
preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other 
whaling waters swept—seemed to have 
chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to 
slay him the more securely there; now, 
that he found himself hard by the very 
latitude and longitude where his 
tormenting wound had been inflicted; 
now that a vessel had been spoken which 
on the very day preceding had actually 
encountered Moby Dick;—and now that all 
his successive meetings with various 
ships contrastingly concurred to show 
the demoniac indifference with which 
the white whale tore his hunters, 
whether sinning or sinned against; now 
it was that there lurked a something in 
the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly 
sufferable for feeble souls to see. As 
the unsetting polar star, which through 
the livelong, 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, fears, were fain to 
hide beneath their souls, and not 
sprout forth a single spear or leaf.

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 
machines, they dumbly moved about the 
deck, ever conscious that the old man’s 
despot eye was on 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 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 exactly 
pacing the planks between two 
undeviating limits,—the main-mast and 
the mizen; or else they saw him 
standing in the cabin-scuttle,—his 
living 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 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 darkly grew all 
gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees 
blown over, which still grow idly on at 
naked base, though perished in the 
upper verdure. But though his whole 
life was now become one watch on deck; 
and though the Parsee’s mystic watch 
was without intermission as his own; 
yet these two never seemed to speak—one 
man to the other—unless at long 
intervals some passing unmomentous 
matter made it necessary. 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, dumb men were 
both, 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 three or four days had slided 
by, after meeting the children-seeking 
Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; 
the monomaniac old man seemed 
distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at 
least, of nearly all except the Pagan 
harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, 
whether Stubb and Flask might not 
willingly overlook the sight he sought. 
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 basket 
prepared a pin for the other end, in 
order to fasten it 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, Tashtego; but 
shunning Fedallah; and then settling 
his firm relying eye upon the chief 
mate, 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 sea. So Ahab’s proceedings in this 
matter were not unusual; the only 
strange thing about them seemed to be, 
that Starbuck, almost the one only man 
who had ever ventured to oppose him 
with anything in the slightest degree 
approaching to decision—one of those 
too, whose faithfulness on the look-out 
he had seemed to doubt somewhat;—it was 
strange, that this was the very man he 
should select for his watchman; freely 
giving his whole life into such an 
otherwise distrusted person’s hands.

Now, the first time Ahab was perched 
aloft; ere he had been there ten 
minutes; one of those red-billed savage 
sea-hawks which so often fly 
incommodiously close round the manned 
mast-heads of whalemen in these 
latitudes; one of these birds came 
wheeling and screaming round his head 
in a maze of untrackably swift 
circlings. 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!” suddenly 
cried the Sicilian seaman, who being 
posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood 
directly behind Ahab, though somewhat 
lower than his level, and with a deep 
gulf of air dividing them.

But already the sable wing was before 
the old man’s eyes; the long hooked 
bill at his head: with a scream, the 
black hawk darted away with his prize.

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 131. The Pequod Meets The 
Delight.

The intense Pequod sailed on; the 
rolling waves and days 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; but you now saw 
through this wreck, as plainly as you 
see through the peeled, half-unhinged, 
and bleaching 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 accursed 
life!”

“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st 
thou that”—pointing to the hammock—“I 
bury but one of five stout men, who 
were alive only yesterday; but were 
dead ere night. Only that one I bury; 
the rest were buried before they died; 
you sail upon their tomb.” Then turning 
to his crew—“Are ye ready there? place 
the plank then on the rail, and lift 
the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing 
towards the hammock with uplifted 
hands—“may the resurrection and the 
life—”

“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 that the corpse soon made as it 
struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, 
but that some of the flying bubbles 
might have 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, 
oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad 
burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to 
show us your coffin!” 

 

CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.

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 snow-white wings of small, 
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle 
thoughts of the feminine air; but to 
and fro in the deeps, far down in the 
bottomless blue, rushed mighty 
leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and 
these were the strong, troubled, 
murderous thinkings of the masculine 
sea.

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 eyes glowing like 
coals, that still glow in the ashes of 
ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in 
the clearness of the morn; lifting his 
splintered 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 cankerous 
thing 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 wilful 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. 
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-town of a 
Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits 
but small entrance to any sympathy from 
the green country without—oh, 
weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast 
slavery of solitary command!—when I 
think of all this; only half-suspected, 
not so keenly known to me before—and 
how for forty years I have fed upon dry 
salted fare—fit emblem of the dry 
nourishment of my soil!—when the 
poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to 
his daily hand, and broken the world’s 
fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, 
whole oceans away, from that young 
girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and 
sailed for Cape Horn the next day, 
leaving but one dent in my marriage 
pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with 
her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that 
poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; 
and then, the madness, the frenzy, the 
boiling blood and the smoking brow, 
with which, for a thousand lowerings 
old Ahab has furiously, foamingly 
chased his prey—more a demon than a 
man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’ 
fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! 
Why this strife of the chase? why 
weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, 
and the iron, and the lance? how the 
richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. 
Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with 
this weary load I bear, one poor leg 
should have been snatched from under 
me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it 
blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks 
so grey did never grow but from out 
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 grey hairs, have I lived 
enough joy to wear ye; and seem and 
feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand 
close to me, Starbuck; let me look into 
a human eye; it is better than to gaze 
into sea or sky; better than to gaze 
upon God. By the green land; by the 
bright hearth-stone! this is the magic 
glass, man; I see my wife and my child 
in thine eye. 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—wife and 
child of his brotherly, sisterly, 
play-fellow youth; 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! the boy’s face from the window! 
the boy’s hand 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.

“What is it, what nameless, 
inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; 
what cozening, hidden lord and master, 
and cruel, remorseless emperor commands 
me; that against all natural lovings 
and longings, I so keep pushing, and 
crowding, and jamming myself on all the 
time; recklessly making me ready to do 
what in my own proper, natural heart, I 
durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, 
Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts 
this arm? But if the great sun move not 
of himself; but is as an errand-boy in 
heaven; nor one single star can 
revolve, but by some invisible power; 
how then can this one small heart beat; 
this one small brain think thoughts; 
unless God does that beating, does that 
thinking, does that living, and not I. 
By heaven, man, we are turned round and 
round in this world, like yonder 
windlass, and Fate is the handspike. 
And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, 
and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon 
Albicore! who put it into him to chase 
and fang that flying-fish? Where do 
murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when 
the judge himself is dragged to the 
bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a 
mild looking sky; and the air smells 
now, as if it blew from a far-away 
meadow; they have been making hay 
somewhere under the slopes of the 
Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are 
sleeping among the new-mown hay. 
Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we 
all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? 
Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last 
year’s scythes flung down, and left in 
the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”

But blanched to a corpse’s hue with 
despair, the Mate had stolen away.

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 133. 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 dog-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 
so long ago 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, that Captain Ahab did, 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; well that! Boats, 
boats!”

Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were 
dropped; all the boat-sails set—all the 
paddles plying; with rippling 
swiftness, shooting to leeward; and 
Ahab heading the onset. 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 hump was distinctly 
visible, sliding along the sea as if an 
isolated thing, and continually set in 
a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, 
greenish foam. He saw the vast, 
involved wrinkles of the slightly 
projecting head beyond. Before it, far 
out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, 
went the glistening white shadow from 
his broad, milky forehead, a musical 
rippling playfully accompanying the 
shade; and behind, the blue waters 
interchangeably flowed over into the 
moving valley of his steady wake; and 
on either hand bright bubbles arose and 
danced by his side. But these were 
broken again by the light toes of 
hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering 
the sea, alternate with their fitful 
flight; and like to some flag-staff 
rising from the painted hull of an 
argosy, the tall but shattered pole of 
a recent lance projected from the white 
whale’s back; and at intervals one of 
the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, 
and to and fro skimming like a canopy 
over the fish, silently perched and 
rocked on this pole, the long tail 
feathers streaming like pennons.

A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness 
of repose in swiftness, invested the 
gliding whale. Not the white bull 
Jupiter swimming away with ravished 
Europa clinging to his graceful horns; 
his lovely, leering eyes sideways 
intent upon the maid; with smooth 
bewitching fleetness, rippling straight 
for the nuptial bower in Crete; not 
Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! 
did surpass the glorified White Whale 
as he so divinely swam.

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 
enticings. No wonder there had been 
some among the hunters who namelessly 
transported and allured by all this 
serenity, had ventured to assail it; 
but had fatally found that quietude but 
the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, 
enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest 
on, to all who for the first time eye 
thee, no matter how many in that same 
way thou may’st have bejuggled and 
destroyed before.

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 god revealed 
himself, sounded, and went out of 
sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping 
on the wing, the white sea-fowls 
longingly 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 Indian file, as when herons 
take wing, the white birds were now all 
flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when 
within a few yards began fluttering 
over the water there, wheeling round 
and round, with joyous, expectant 
cries. Their vision was keener than 
man’s; Ahab could discover no sign in 
the sea. But suddenly as he peered down 
and down into its depths, he profoundly 
saw a white living spot no bigger than 
a white weasel, with wonderful celerity 
uprising, and magnifying as it rose, 
till it turned, and then there were 
plainly revealed two long crooked rows 
of white, glistening teeth, floating up 
from the undiscoverable bottom. 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, sidelingly 
transplanted himself, as it were, 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. 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 gripe. As now he 
thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped 
from him; 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 in the billows; and at 
the same time slowly revolving his 
whole spindled body; so that when his 
vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty 
or more feet out of the water—the now 
rising swells, with all their confluent 
waves, dazzlingly broke against it; 
vindictively tossing their shivered 
spray still higher into the air.* So, 
in a gale, the but half baffled Channel 
billows only recoil from the base of 
the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap 
its summit with their scud.

*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; and 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 Stubb’s boat with 
blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white 
brine caking in his wrinkles; the long 
tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did 
crack, and helplessly he yielded to his 
body’s doom: for a time, lying all 
crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, 
like one trodden under foot of herds of 
elephants. 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, though summary in each one 
suffering; still, if the gods decree 
it, in their life-time aggregate a 
whole age of woe, wholly made up of 
instantaneous intensities; for even in 
their pointless centres, those 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; a thing barely tolerable only in 
some one brief vicissitude. 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; and ye two are all 
mankind; and Ahab stands alone among 
the millions of the peopled earth, nor 
gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, 
cold—I shiver!—How now? Aloft there! 
D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout, 
though he spout ten times a second!”

The day was nearly done; only the hem 
of his golden robe was rustling. 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 134. 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 for;—the 
top-gallant sails!—aye, they should 
have been kept on her all night. But no 
matter—‘tis but resting for the rush.”

Here be it said, that this pertinacious 
pursuit of one particular whale, 
continued through day into night, and 
through night into day, is a thing by 
no means unprecedented in the South sea 
fishery. For such is the wonderful 
skill, prescience of experience, and 
invincible confidence acquired by some 
great natural geniuses among the 
Nantucket commanders; that from the 
simple observation of a whale when last 
descried, they will, under certain 
given circumstances, pretty accurately 
foretell both the direction in which he 
will continue to swim for a time, while 
out of sight, as well as his probable 
rate of progression during that period. 
And, in these cases, somewhat as a 
pilot, when about losing sight of a 
coast, whose general trending he well 
knows, and which he desires shortly to 
return to again, but at some further 
point; like as this pilot stands by his 
compass, and takes the precise bearing 
of the cape at present visible, in 
order the more certainly to hit aright 
the remote, unseen headland, eventually 
to be visited: so does the fisherman, 
at his compass, with the whale; for 
after being chased, and diligently 
marked, through several hours of 
daylight, then, when night obscures the 
fish, the creature’s future wake 
through the darkness is almost as 
established to the sagacious mind of 
the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to 
him. So that to this hunter’s wondrous 
skill, the proverbial evanescence of a 
thing writ in water, a wake, is to all 
desired purposes well nigh as reliable 
as the steadfast land. And as the 
mighty iron Leviathan of the modern 
railway is so familiarly known in its 
every pace, that, with watches in their 
hands, men time his rate as doctors 
that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say 
of it, the up train or the down train 
will reach such or such a spot, at such 
or such an hour; even so, almost, there 
are occasions when these Nantucketers 
time that other Leviathan of the deep, 
according to the observed humor of his 
speed; and say to themselves, so many 
hours hence this whale will have gone 
two hundred miles, will have about 
reached this or that degree of latitude 
or longitude. But to render this 
acuteness at all successful in the end, 
the wind and the sea must be the 
whaleman’s allies; for of what present 
avail to the becalmed or windbound 
mariner is the skill that assures him 
he is exactly ninety-three leagues and 
a quarter from his port? Inferable from 
these statements, are many collateral 
subtile matters touching the chase of 
whales.

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.

“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 that crew. The frenzies of the 
chase had by this time worked them 
bubblingly up, like old wine worked 
anew. Whatever pale fears and 
forebodings some of them 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 their 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 their wild craft went 
plunging towards its flying mark; by 
all these things, their hearts were 
bowled along. The wind that made great 
bellies of their sails, and rushed the 
vessel on by arms invisible as 
irresistible; this seemed the symbol of 
that unseen agency which so enslaved 
them to the race.

They were one man, not thirty. For as 
the one ship that held them all; though 
it was put together of all contrasting 
things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; 
iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these 
ran into each other in the one concrete 
hull, which shot on its way, both 
balanced and directed by the long 
central keel; even so, all the 
individualities of the crew, this man’s 
valor, that man’s fear; guilt and 
guiltiness, all varieties were welded 
into oneness, and were all directed to 
that fatal goal which Ahab their one 
lord and keel did point to.

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 their fate. Ah! how they 
still strove through that infinite 
blueness to seek out the thing that 
might destroy them!

“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, seemed only intent on 
annihilating each separate plank of 
which those boats were made. But 
skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly 
wheeling like trained chargers in the 
field; the boats for a while eluded 
him; though, at times, but by a plank’s 
breadth; while all the time, Ahab’s 
unearthly slogan tore every other cry 
but his to shreds.

But 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 twisted—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. Only one thing could be done. 
Seizing the boat-knife, he critically 
reached within—through—and then, 
without—the rays of steel; dragged in 
the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to 
the bowsman, and then, twice sundering 
the rope near the chocks—dropped the 
intercepted fagot of steel into the 
sea; and was all fast again. 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; 
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 aslope little 
Flask bobbed up and down like an empty 
vial, twitching his legs upwards to 
escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and 
Stubb was lustily singing out for some 
one to ladle him up; and while the old 
man’s line—now parting—admitted of his 
pulling into the creamy pool to rescue 
whom he could;—in that wild 
simultaneousness of a thousand 
concreted perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken 
boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by 
invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, 
shooting perpendicularly from the sea, 
the White Whale dashed his broad 
forehead against its bottom, and sent 
it, turning over and over, into the 
air; till it fell again—gunwale 
downwards—and Ahab and his men 
struggled out from under it, like seals 
from a sea-side cave.

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, 
bit of plank, 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! Accursed fate! that the 
unconquerable captain in the soul 
should have such a craven mate!”

“Sir?”

“My 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 Stubb—“he must have 
been caught in—”

“The black vomit wrench thee!—run all 
of ye above, alow, cabin, 
forecastle—find him—not gone—not gone!”

But quickly they returned to him with 
the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere 
to be found.

“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’ 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. This whole act’s immutably 
decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me 
a billion years before this ocean 
rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ 
lieutenant; 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 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’ll, I’ll 
solve it, though!”

When dusk descended, the whale was 
still in sight to leeward.

So once more the sail was shortened, 
and everything passed nearly as on the 
previous night; only, 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; sat due eastward for the earliest 
sun. 

 

CHAPTER 135. 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. Here’s food for 
thought, had Ahab time to think; but 
Ahab never thinks; he only feels, 
feels, feels; that’s tingling enough 
for mortal man! to think’s audacity. 
God only has that right and privilege. 
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness 
and a calmness; and our poor hearts 
throb, and our poor brains beat too 
much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes 
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, 
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 the wild winds blow it; they 
whip it about me as the torn shreds of 
split sails lash the tossed ship they 
cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt 
blown ere this through prison corridors 
and cells, and wards of hospitals, 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, I say 
again, and swear it now, that there’s 
something all glorious and gracious in 
the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at 
least, that in the clear heavens blow 
straight on, in strong and steadfast, 
vigorous mildness; and veer not from 
their mark, however the baser currents 
of the sea may turn and tack, and 
mightiest Mississippies of the land 
swift and swerve about, uncertain where 
to go at last. And by the eternal 
Poles! these same Trades that so 
directly blow my good ship on; these 
Trades, or something like 
them—something so unchangeable, and 
full as strong, blow my keeled soul 
along! To it! 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, Ahab descried the spout again, and 
instantly from the three mast-heads 
three shrieks went up as if the tongues 
of fire had voiced it.

“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; sound in our 
hulls, though, are we not, my ship? 
Aye, 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.

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 a voice 
from the low cabin-window there; “O 
master, my master, come back!”

But Ahab heard nothing; for his own 
voice was high-lifted then; and the 
boat leaped on.

Yet the voice spake true; for scarce 
had he 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; 
and whether it was that Ahab’s crew 
were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, 
and therefore their flesh more musky to 
the senses of the sharks—a matter 
sometimes well known to affect 
them,—however it was, 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 on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft 
there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the 
boats:—

“Mark well the whale!—Ho! again!—drive 
off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears 
the vane”—pointing to the red flag 
flying at the main-truck—“Ha! he soars 
away with it!—Where’s the old man now? 
see’st thou that sight, oh 
Ahab!—shudder, shudder!”

The boats had not gone very far, when 
by a signal from the mast-heads—a 
downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that 
the whale had sounded; but intending to 
be near him at the next rising, he held 
on his way a little sideways from the 
vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining 
the profoundest silence, as the 
head-beat waves hammered and hammered 
against the opposing bow.

“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. 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 in the turns upon 
turns in which, during the past night, 
the whale had reeled the involutions of 
the lines around him, the half torn 
body of the Parsee was seen; his sable 
raiment frayed to shreds; his distended 
eyes turned full upon old Ahab.

The harpoon dropped from his 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—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, “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 it to the mast.

Whether fagged 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; he was even thus close 
to him; 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 a 
morass, 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; bethinking 
it—it may be—a larger and nobler foe; 
of a sudden, he bore down upon its 
advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid 
fiery showers of foam.

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 woman’s 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 mattrass 
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 to it; 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, 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 from 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, 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 
pagan 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 vortex, carried 
the smallest chip of the Pequod out of 
sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly 
poured themselves over the sunken head 
of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving 
a few inches of the erect spar yet 
visible, together with long streaming 
yards of the flag, which calmly 
undulated, with ironical coincidings, 
over the destroying billows they almost 
touched;—at that instant, a red 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 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 “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, when that bowsman assumed the 
vacant post; the same, who, when on the 
last day the three men were tossed from 
out of the rocking boat, was dropped 
astern. 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 shot lengthwise from 
the sea, fell over, and floated by my 
side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for 
almost one whole day and 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. On the second 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. 

 THE END

 

"Indeed a very good read. It took some 
time to finish, but it's not like I'm 
too busy down here"

-A Shade 