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 life-time —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 Whale 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 favor
..
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
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 cvi 29 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 heart-woes, 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 cvii 11 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, counter-sinkers. 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 cviii 7 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 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; so; —yes, yes —oh 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 mayest 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 this 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 cix 21 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 unfavorable
affair.
..
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 Burtons, 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.
..
In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a
regular semi-weekly 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.
..






.. < chapter cx 4 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 favor 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-colored 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 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 cxi 2 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 cxii 13 THE BLACKSMITH >
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 petulence 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 grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry
thee! Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun-rise, and by
fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth
went a-whaling.
..






.. < chapter cxiii 2 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 woful 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, a light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most
piteous sound was heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but
unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the
black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it!
..






.. < chapter cxiv 20 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 though
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 cxv 16 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 colors 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' staterooms. 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 Bastile, 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 are 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 sayest; 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 homeward-bound 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 cxvi 2 THE DYING WHALE >
Not seldom in this life, when, on the
right side, fortune's favorites 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-favoring eyes
should see these too-favoring 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 cxvii 23 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 cxviii 2 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 obervation 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 immeasureable 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 colored 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
dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my
place on the sea. Aye, lighting from the boat to the deck, thus I
trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split
and destroy thee! As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled 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 it!
..






.. < chapter cxix 19 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 tetering 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 teter 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 main-mast 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 do I 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! t'is 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 cxx 10 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 cxxi 2 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