Moby-Dick

Melville, Herman

Published: 1851
Type(s): Novels
Source: Wikisource
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About Melville:
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist,
short story writer, essayist, and poet. His earliest novels were bestsellers, but his
popularity declined later in his life. By the time of his death he had virtually been
forgotten, but his longest novel, Moby-Dick — largely considered a failure during
his lifetime, and responsible for Melville’s drop in popularity — was rediscovered in
the 20th century as a literary masterpiece.
Source: Wikipedia

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Contents

1 Loomings 4

2 The Carpet-Bag 8

3 The Spouter-Inn 11

4 The Counterpane 20

5 Breakfast 23

6 The Street 25

7 The Chapel 27

8 The Pulpit 30

9 The Sermon 32

10 A Bosom Friend 38

11 Nightgown 41

12 Biographical 43

13 Wheelbarrow 45

14 Nantucket 48

15 Chowder 50

16 The Ship 53

17 The Ramadan 62

18 His Mark 66

19 The Prophet 69

20 All Astir 72

21 Going Aboard 74

22 Merry Christmas 77

23 The Lee Shore 80

24 The Advocate 81

25 Postscript 84

26 Knights and Squires 85

27 Knights and Squires 88

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28 Ahab 91

29 Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb 94

30 The Pipe 96

31 Queen Mab 97

32 Cetology 99

33 The Specksynder 108

34 The Cabin-Table 110

35 The Mast-Head 114

36 The Quarter-Deck 119

37 Sunset 124

38 Dusk 126

39 First Night Watch 127

40 Midnight, Forecastle 128

41 Moby Dick 132

42 The Whiteness of The Whale 138

43 Hark! 144

44 The Chart 145

45 The Affidavit 149

46 Surmises 155

47 The Mat-Maker 157

48 The First Lowering 159

49 The Hyena 166

50 Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah 168

51 The Spirit-Spout 170

52 The Albatross 173

53 The Gam 175

54 The Town-Ho’s Story 178

55 Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales 191

56 Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes 195

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

Stars 198

58 Brit 200

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59 Squid 202

60 The Line 204

61 Stubb Kills a Whale 207

62 The Dart 211

63 The Crotch 213

64 Stubb’s Supper 215

65 The Whale as a Dish 220

66 The Shark Massacre 222

67 Cutting In 224

68 The Blanket 226

69 The Funeral 229

70 The Sphynx 230

71 The Jeroboam’s Story 232

72 The Monkey-Rope 236

73 Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him 239

74 The Sperm Whale’s Head — Contrasted View 243

75 The Right Whale’s Head — Contrasted View 246

76 The Battering-Ram 249

77 The Great Heidelburgh Tun 251

78 Cistern and Buckets 253

79 The Prairie 256

80 The Nut 258

81 The Pequod Meets The Virgin 260

82 The Honor and Glory of Whaling 267

83 Jonah Historically Regarded 269

84 Pitchpoling 271

85 The Fountain 273

86 The Tail 277

87 The Great Armada 280

88 Schools and Schoolmasters 288

89 Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish 291

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90 Heads or Tails 294

91 The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud 297

92 Ambergris 302

93 The Castaway 304

94 A Squeeze of the Hand 307

95 The Cassock 310

96 The Try-Works 311

97 The Lamp 314

98 Stowing Down and Clearing Up 315

99 The Doubloon 317

100Leg and Arm 321

101The Decanter 326

102A Bower in the Arsacides 329

103Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton 332

104The Fossil Whale 334

105Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? — Will He Perish? 337

106Ahab’s Leg 340

107The Carpenter 342

108Ahab and the Carpenter 344

109Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin 347

110Queequeg in His Coffin 349

111The Pacific 353

112The Blacksmith 354

113The Forge 356

114The Gilder 359

115The Pequod Meets The Bachelor 361

116The Dying Whale 363

117The Whale Watch 365

118The Quadrant 367

119The Candles 369

120The Deck Toward the End of the First Night Watch 374

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121Midnight — The Forecastle Bulwarks 375

122Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning 377

123The Musket 378

124The Needle 381

125The Log and Line 384

126The Life-Buoy 387

127The Deck 390

128The Pequod Meets the Rachel 392

129The Cabin 395

130The Hat 397

131The Pequod Meets The Delight 400

132The Symphony 402

133The Chase — First Day 405

134The Chase — Second Day 411

135The Chase — Third Day 417

136Epilogue 425
ETYMOLOGY (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School) . . . . . . . 426

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Chapter I
Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or
no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought
I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have
of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself
growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my
soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and
bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos
get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent
me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s
hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my
substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself
upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If
they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very
nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as
Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left,
the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that
noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous
were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears
Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you
see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thou-
sands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some
seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from
China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward
peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied
to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green
fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly
bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the
land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They
must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there
they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys,
streets and avenues,— north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me,
does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract
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them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost
any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you
there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of
men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet
a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.
Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if
your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every
one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest,
most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is
the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk,
as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there
sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant
woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed
in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this
pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were
vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go
visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep
among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?— Water - there is not a drop of
water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand
miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two
handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed,
or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every
robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy
to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such
a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight
of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it
a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not
grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was
drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the
image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow
hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to
have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you
must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in
it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick— grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do
not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor,
though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain,
or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them.
For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations
of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,
without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for
going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a
sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though
once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is
no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl
than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis

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Moby-Dick 10

and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge
bakehouses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down
into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me
about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May
meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s
sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land,
the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just
previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country
schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen
one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of
Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in
time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep
down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales
of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less
of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular
instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains
may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the
satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other
served in much the same way— either in a physical or metaphysical point of view,
that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each
other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for
my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of.
On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in
the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most
uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being
paid,— what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives
money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be
the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.
Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure
air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent
than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for
the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second
hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so.
In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things,
at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after
having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my
head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has
the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some
unaccountable way— he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my
going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence
that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo
between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have
run something like this:
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.”
“Whaling voyage by one Ishmael.”

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“Bloody battle in AFFGHANISTAN.”

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put
me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for
magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies,
and jolly parts in farces— though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I
recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives
which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set
about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a
choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.
Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild
and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils
of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights
and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things
would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting
itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social
with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the
inmates of the place one lodges in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-
gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to
my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of
the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill
in the air.

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Chapter II
The Carpet-Bag

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started
for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived
in New Bedford. It was on a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed
upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no
way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this
same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related
that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no
other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about
everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.
Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business
of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her,
yet Nantucket was her great original— the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where
the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did
those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase
to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous
little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones—so goes the story—
to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a
harpoon from the bowsprit?
Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New
Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment
where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very
dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With
anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of
silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of
a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north
with the darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom you may conclude
to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t be
too particular.
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The Crossed
Harpoons”—but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright
red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” there came such fervent rays, that it seemed
to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else
the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,—rather
weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from
Moby-Dick 13

hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too
expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare
in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael,
said I at last; don’t you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are
stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me
waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! Blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here
and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night,
of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But
presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of
which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses
of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the
porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes
from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But “The Crossed Harpoons,” and the “The
Sword-Fish?”—this, then must needs be the sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked
myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior
door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces
turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating
a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the
blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha,
Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard
a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with
a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and
these words underneath—“The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But
it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an
emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked
quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might
have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging
sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot
for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were,
and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous
wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed
craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors,
with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. In judging of that tempestuous
wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I possess the only copy
extant—”it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from
a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest
it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the
wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to
my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and
this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the
crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make
any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips
were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against
the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might

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Moby-Dick 14

plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would
not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red
silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty
night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental
summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my
own summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to
the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here?
Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea,
ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of
Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the
Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen
sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears
of orphans.
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty
of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of
a place this “Spouter” may be.

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Chapter III
The Spouter-Inn

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, strag-
gling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some
condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly
besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you
viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and
careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding
of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you
almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags,
had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest
contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the
little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that
such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous,
black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue,
dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy
picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of
indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it,
till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous
painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you
through.— It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the
four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.— It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s
the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded
to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and
all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic
fish? even the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based
upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon
the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-
foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and
an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous
act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of
monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling
ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped,
with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by
Moby-Dick 16

a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous
cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking,
horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons
all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance,
now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a
sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung in
Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of
Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning
in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the
hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way— cut through
what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all
round—you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low
ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would
almost fancy you trod some old craft’s cockpits, especially of such a howling night,
when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low,
shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered
from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the room
stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale’s head. Be
that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a
coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with
old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another
cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old
man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true
cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered
downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass,
surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny;
to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass— the Cape Horn measure, which
you may gulp down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a
table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the
landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for
answer that his house was full— not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added,
tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket,
have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of
thing.”
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it
would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really
had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why
rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put
up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.
“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be
ready directly.”
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At
one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping
over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his
hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It

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was cold as Iceland— no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing
but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up
our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen
fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes,
but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green
box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.
“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”
“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer is a dark
complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t— he eats nothing but steaks,
and he likes ’em rare.”
“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”
“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark complexioned”
harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should
sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what
else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried,
“That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three
years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from
the Feegees.”
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in
rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and
with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their
beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had
just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder,
then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth— the bar—when the
wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round.
One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like
potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and
catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the
coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island.
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the
arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most
obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed
desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon
the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested
me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my
shipmate (though but a sleeping partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned),
I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in height,
with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn
in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling
by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences
that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was
a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall
mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his
companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and

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I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes,
however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a
huge favorite with them, they raised a cry of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s
Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.
It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally
quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had
occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not
sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private
when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger,
in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your
objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor
should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep two in
a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in
one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own
blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought
of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or
woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest.
I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer
ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me
at midnight— how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?
“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.— I shan’t sleep with
him. I’ll try the bench here.”
“Just as you please; I’m sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and
it’s a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots and notches. “But wait a
bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got a carpenter’s plane there in the bar—wait, I say, and
I’ll make ye snug enough.” So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk
handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the
while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the plane-
iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near spraining
his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake to quit—the bed was soft enough to suit
me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a
pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and throwing them
into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left
me in a brown study.
I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but
that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other bench
in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one— so there was no
yoking them. I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only clear space
against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in.
But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under the
sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another current
from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed a
series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought
to spend the night.
The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a march on
him—bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the most
violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea but upon second thoughts I dismissed it.

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For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room,
the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!
Still looking around me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a
sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that after all I
might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer.
Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I’ll have a good look
at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all—there’s no
telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and
going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
“Landlord! said I, “what sort of a chap is he—does he always keep such late
hours?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily
tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered, “generally he’s
an early bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yea, he’s the bird what catches the
worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on airth
keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can’t sell his head.”
“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling
me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this
harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday
morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell it here, the
market’s overstocked.”
“With what?” shouted I.
“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop spinning
that yarn to me—I’m not green.”
“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess
you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.”
“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable
farrago of the landlord’s.
“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
“Broke,” said I—“broke, do you mean?”
“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snowstorm—“landlord,
stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too without delay. I
come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that
the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I
have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating
stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you
design for my bedfellow—a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and
confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell
me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to
spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay
that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this
harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir,
you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly would
thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sarmon for a

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Moby-Dick 20

chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I
have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up
a lot of ‘balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he’s sold all on
’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and
it would not do to be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is goin’ to
churches. He wanted to last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin’ out of
the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions.”
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that
the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me— but at the same time what
could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy
Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
“Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”
“He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting dreadful late, you
had better be turning flukes—it’s a nice bed: Sal and me slept in that ere bed the
night we were spliced. There’s plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed;
it’s an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam
and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one
night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his
arm. After that, Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll give ye a glim in a
jiffy;” and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead
the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed
“I vum it’s Sunday—you won’t see that harpooneer to-night; he’s come to anchor
somewhere—come along then; do come; won’t ye come?”
I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered
into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious
bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.
“There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did dou-
ble duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there, make yourself comfortable now;
and good night to ye.” I turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most
elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the room; and
besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to
the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing
a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there
was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large
seaman’s bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land
trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over
the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.
But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and felt it,
and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion
concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the
edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round
an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, as you
see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober
harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town
in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper,
being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this
mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of
glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself

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out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

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

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Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the
second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of this headpeddling purple
rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and
being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was
now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into
my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game
enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning
what seemed inexplicable in him.
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his
chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same
squares as his face, his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to
have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster
shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs
were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must
be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South
Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler
of heads too—perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to
mine—heavens! look at that tomahawk!
But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something
that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed
be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had
previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a
curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a
three days’ old Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost
thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner.
But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like
polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed
it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing the
papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between
the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I
thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo
idol.
I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at ease
meantime—to see what was next to follow. First he takes about a double handful
of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then
laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled
the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the
fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be scorching
them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the
heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro. But the little
devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips.
All these strange antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from
the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan
psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural
manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously,
and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman
bagging a dead woodcock.
All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him
now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping

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into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light was put
out, to break the spell in which I had so long been bound.
But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. Taking up
his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then
holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of
tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal,
tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help
it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.
Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against the
wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep quiet, and
let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural responses satisfied me at
once that he but ill comprehended my meaning.
“Who-e debel you?”—he at last said—“you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.” And so
saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.
“Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! Coffin!
Angels! save me!”
“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the cannibal,
while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about
me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the
landlord came into the room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldn’t harm a
hair of your head.”
“Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didn’t you tell me that that infernal
harpooneer was a cannibal?”
“I thought ye know’d it;—didn’t I tell ye, he was a peddlin’ heads around town?—but
turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here—you sabbee me, I sabbee—you
this man sleepe you—you sabbee?”
“Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up
in bed.
“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing
the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and
charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on
the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have been making
about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as
much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober
cannibal than a drunken Christian.
“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever
you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I
don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s dangerous. Besides, I ain’t
insured.”
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned
me to get into bed—rolling over to one side as much as to say— I won’t touch a leg
of ye.”
“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.

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Chapter IV
The Counterpane

Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over
me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been
his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares
and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan
labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade— owing I
suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt
sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times— this same arm of his, I say, looked
for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on
it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so
blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure
that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child,
I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was
a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I
had been cutting up some caper or other— I think it was trying to crawl up the
chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who,
somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,—
my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed,
though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day
in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so
up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as
possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.
I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I
could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached
to think of it. And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a
great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the
house. I felt worse and worse— at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down
in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at
her feet, beseeching her as a particular favor to give me a good slippering for my
misbehaviour: anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable
length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and
back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a
great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent
misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and
slowly waking from it—half steeped in dreams—I opened my eyes, and the before
Moby-Dick 25

sunlit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running
through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a
supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and
the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged,
seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay
there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever
thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken.
I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the
morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months
afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to
this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.
Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural
hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experi-
enced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. But at
length all the past night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and
then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his
arm— unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me
tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse
him—“Queequeg!”—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck
feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing
aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it
were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange
house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! “Queequeg!—in the name
of goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and
incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male
in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently,
he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from
the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his
eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him.
Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent
upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed
made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, recon-
ciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave
me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to
dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under
the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages
have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially
polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated
me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness;
staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my
curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you
don’t see every day, he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding.
He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one, by the
by, and then—still minus his trowsers— he hunted up his boots. What under the
heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush himself—
boots in hand, and hat on—under the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and
strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of
propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on

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Moby-Dick 26

his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state— neither
caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness
in the strangest possible manner. His education was not yet completed. He was
an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably
would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still
a savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At
last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes,
and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed
to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones— probably not made to order
either—rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.
Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street
being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and
observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about
with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate
his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible.
He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any
Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement, contented
himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. He then donned
his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table,
dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where
he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner,
slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot,
and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or
rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers’s best
cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I
came to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly
sharp the long straight edges are always kept.
The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the
room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a
marshal’s baton.

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Chapter V
Breakfast

I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning
landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been
skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my bedfellow.
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing;
the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a
good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself
to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully
laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night
previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all
whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and
sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and
brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey
jackets for morning gowns.
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young
fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell
almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage.
That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is
in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached
withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek
like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes’ western
slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.
“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to
breakfast.
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in
manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great
New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed
the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a
sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an
empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo’s
performances— this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining
a high social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had anywhere.
These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we were
all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories about whaling;
to my no small surprise nearly every man maintained a profound silence. And not
Moby-Dick 28

only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many
of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high
seas—entire strangers to them— and duelled them dead without winking; and yet,
here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred
tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been
out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these
bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!
But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them— at the head of the
table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his
breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his
harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching
over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the
beefsteaks towards him. But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every
one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.
We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee
and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare. Enough,
that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted
his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with his
inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.

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Chapter VI
The Street

If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as

Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment
soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New
Bedford.
In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer
to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway
and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted
ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the
Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all
Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but
in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright;
many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and
Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded
reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more
comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New
Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young,
of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe
and snatch the whale. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they
came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that
chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow tailed coat,
girdled with a sailor belt and a sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou’-wester
and a bombazine cloak.
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a downright
bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin
gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it
into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery,
you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking
his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers.
Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale,
when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.
But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bump-
kins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not
been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as
howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are
Moby-Dick 30

enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest
place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like
Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in
the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere
in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more
opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once
scraggy scoria of a country?
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion,
and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens
came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned
and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a
feat like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and
portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to
see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and
every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples— long avenues
of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-
chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of
congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford
has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown
aside at creation’s final day.
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses
only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as
sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot,
save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor
sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the
odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.

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Chapter VII
The Chapel

In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the
moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a
Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this special
errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.
Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way
against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of
sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at
times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting
apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The
chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat
steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall
on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do
not pretend to quote:
SACRED
to the memory
of
John TALBOT,
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836.
This tablet
Is erected to his Memory
by his sister.
SACRED
to the memory
of
ROBERT long, WILLIS ELLERY,
Nathan COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH Macy,
and Samuel GLEIG,
Forming one of the boats’ crews
of
the ship ELIZA
Who were towed out of sight by a Whale,
On the Off-shore Ground in the
Moby-Dick 32

Pacific,
December 31st, 1839.
This marble
Is here placed by their surviving
shipmates.
SACRED
to the memory
of
The late
captain Ezekiel hardy,
Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a
Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,
August 3d, 1833.
This tablet
Is erected to his Memory
by
his widow.
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the
door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the
solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his
countenance. This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my
entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not
reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the
seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew
not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did
several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing
grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing
hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to
bleed afresh.
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among
flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods
in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which
cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids
and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse
resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well
might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is
that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing
more secrets than the Goodwin Sands! how it is that to his name who yesterday
departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do
not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth;
why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what
eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam
who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted
for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all
the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a
tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts
she gathers her most vital hope.

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Moby-Dick 33

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

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Chapter VIII
The Pulpit

I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable robustness entered;
immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regard-
ful eyeing of him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man
was the chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen,
among whom he was a very great favorite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer
in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry. At
the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old
age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for
among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly
developing bloom— the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February’s snow.
No one having previously heard his history, could for the first time behold Father
Mapple without the utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical
peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led.
When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come
in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot
cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it
had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and
hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he
quietly approached the pulpit.
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs
to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already
small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father
Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side
ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling
captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for
this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany color,
the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no
means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both
hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look
upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over
hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with swinging
ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood, so that at every
step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me
that however convenient for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed
Moby-Dick 35

unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height,
slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder
step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his
little Quebec.
I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father
Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could not
suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I,
there must be some sober reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize
something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies
his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?
Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God,
this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a
perennial well of water within the walls.
But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, borrowed from
the chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand
of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was adorned with a large painting
representing a gallant ship beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black
rocks and snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds,
there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel’s face;
and this bright face shed a distant spot of radiance upon the ship’s tossed deck,
something like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory’s plank where Nelson
fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say, “beat on, beat on, thou noble ship,
and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling
off— serenest azure is at hand.”
Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had achieved
the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship’s bluff
bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after
a ship’s fiddle-headed beak.
What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost
part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is
the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest
brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable
winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and
the pulpit is its prow.

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Chapter IX
The Sermon

Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the
scattered people to condense. “Star board gangway, there! side away to lar-
board—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still
slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the
preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown
hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply
devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a
ship that is foundering at sea in a fog— in such tones he commenced reading the
following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst
forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,
And lift me deepening down to doom.
I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell—
Oh, I was plunging to despair.
In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints—
No more the whale did me confine.
With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.
My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power.
Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling
of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of
Moby-Dick 37

the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: “Beloved
shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared
a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’”
“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters— four yarns—is one of the
smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul
does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What
a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously
grand! We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom
of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this
lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a
lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As
sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness,
suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally
the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son
of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God— never mind now
what that command was, or how conveyed— which he found a hard command. But
all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—
and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey
God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the
hardness of obeying God consists.
“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking
to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries
where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about
the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks,
perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have
been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of learned men. And
where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as
Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was
an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the
most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more
than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of
Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from
God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched
hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile
burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that
had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something
wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no
baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,—no friends accompany him to the
wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish
ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain
in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to
mark the stranger’s evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease
and confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man
assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious
way, one whispers to the other—“Jack, he’s robbed a widow;” or, “Joe, do you mark
him; he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in
old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs
to read the bill that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is
moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and

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containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill;
while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their
hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles. and summoning all his boldness to his
face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected;
but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors
find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends
into the cabin.
“‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his
papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless question mangles
Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. ‘I seek a
passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy Captain
had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner
does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. ‘We sail with
the next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. ‘No
sooner, sir?’—‘Soon enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.’ Ha! Jonah,
that’s another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll sail
with ye,’—he says,—‘the passage money how much is that?— I’ll pay now.’ For it
is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this
history, ‘that he paid the fare thereof ’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with the
context, this is full of meaning.
“Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in
any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates,
sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a
pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of
Jonah’s purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and
it’s assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same
time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly
takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin
to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for
his passage. ‘Point out my state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m travel-weary; I need
sleep.” “Thou look’st like it,’ says the Captain, ‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and
would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling
there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors
of convicts’ cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as
he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling
almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that
contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship’s water-line, Jonah feels the heralding
presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of
his bowels’ wards.
“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in
Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the
last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a
permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight
itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp
alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the
place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.
But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling,
and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, “straight
upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’

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“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but
with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so
much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight
still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be
passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as
over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught
to staunch it; so, after sore wrestling in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous
misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the
deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That
ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah.
But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on,
the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her;
when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking,
and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over
Jonah’s head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees
no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or
heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is
cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides
of the ship— a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the
frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, ‘What meanest thou,
O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to
his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But
at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks.
Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring
fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as
the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness
overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon
beat downward again towards the tormented deep.
“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes,
the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more
certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring
the whole matter to high Heaven, they all-outward to casting lots, to see for whose
cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah’s; that discovered,
then how furiously they mob him with their questions. ‘What is thine occupation?
Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the
behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from;
whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another
answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from
Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who
hath made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou
fear the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession;
whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For
when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the
darkness of his deserts,— when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and
cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest was
upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the
ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised

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invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.
“And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when
instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah
carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the
whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment
when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-
to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed
unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts,
upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he
is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful
punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with
this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple.
And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but
grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is
shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates,
I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before
you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like
Jonah.”
While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm
without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s
sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a
ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements at work; and the
thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his
eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to
them.
There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the
Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment,
seemed communing with God and himself.
But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an
aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:
“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me.
I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all
sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.
And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches
there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that
other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living
God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden by
the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah,
appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape
his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he
never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed
him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into the
midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms
down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of
woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet—‘out of the
belly of hell’—when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then,
God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto
the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came
breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and

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earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came
a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still
multitudinously murmuring of the ocean— Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And
what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was
it!
“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God
who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him
who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe
to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is
more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!
Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe
to him who as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a
castaway!
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face
to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly
enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a
sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.
Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far
upward, and inward delight— who against the proud gods and commodores of this
earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong
arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down
beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns,
and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and
Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord,
but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all
the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this
sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming
to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!— chiefly known to me by
Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be
this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is
man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands,
and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in
the place.

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Chapter X
A Bosom Friend

Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone;
he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was sitting on a
bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding
close up to his face that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a
jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his
heathenish way.
But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the
table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the
pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page— as I fancied—stopping
for a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn
gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin again at the next fifty;
seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more
than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together,
that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously
marred about the face—at least to my taste— his countenance yet had a something
in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all
his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in
his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would
dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about
the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a
man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that
his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and
looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but
certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous,
but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of
him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows,
which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on
top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking
out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled
himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with counting
the pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping
together the night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had
found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference of his
Moby-Dick 43

very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how
to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity
seems as Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all,
or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever;
appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck
me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost
sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the
way of Cape Horn, that is— which was the only way he could get there—thrown
among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he
seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own
companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy;
though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps,
to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving.
So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I
conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his digester.”
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage
when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at;
the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in
upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began
to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered
heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing
savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature
in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a
very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards
him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the
very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian
kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made
some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first
he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s
hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told
him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the
purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it. Thus
I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the best we could
about the various outer sights to be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed
a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a
puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it
regularly passing between us.
If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast, this
pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed
to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke
was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and
said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we
were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman,
this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be
much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together.
He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet,
and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading

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them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed
one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he
silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He then
went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper firebrand.
By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him;
but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he
invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian
Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece
of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the
magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be
jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—
to do the will of God? that is worship. And what is the will of God?— to do to
my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me— that is the will of
God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg
would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship.
Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So
I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt
biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that
done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the
world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures
between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls
to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly
morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg— a cosy, loving
pair.

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Chapter XI
Nightgown

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg
now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then
drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last,
by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether
departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way
down the future.
Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to
grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes
well tucked around us, leaning against the headboard with our four knees drawn
up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our knee-pans were
warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of
doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The
more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must
be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.
Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable,
and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your
head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel
most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment
should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts
of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the
blankets between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there
you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once
I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by
night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut,
in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man
can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were
indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our
clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and
self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated
twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I at all object
to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light, seeing that we
were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs
from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance
Moby-Dick 46

to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices
grow when love once love comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than
to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of
such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord’s
policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness
of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn
about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly
there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the
new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant
scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his
history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I
but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had
become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the
whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.

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Chapter XII
Biographical

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is
not down on any map; true places never are.
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass
clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then,
in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of
Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King;
his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the
wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal
stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his
untutored youth.
A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to
Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his
suit; and not all the King his father’s influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed
a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship
must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the
other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the
water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward,
he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like
a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized
and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon
the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in
pieces.
In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass
over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not.
Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom,
the captain at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this
fine young savage— this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain’s cabin. They
put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter
content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming
ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored
countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound desire to
learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than
they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices
of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and
wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag
Moby-Dick 48

Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and
seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for
lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their
clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though
now some time from home.
By hints I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a
coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very old
and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he was
fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure
and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he
would return,—as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however,
he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a
harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future move-
ments. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him
that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out
of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous whaleman to
embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the
same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in
short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck
of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt
for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be
of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of
whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.
His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me,
pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from
each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.

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Chapter XIII
Wheelbarrow

Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a
block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my comrade’s money.
The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the
sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg— especially as
Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me
concerning the very person whom I now companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor
carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to
“the Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were
going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much— for they were used to
seeing cannibals like him in their streets,— but at seeing him and me upon such
confidential terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by
turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon
barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance,
he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular
affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a
mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In short, like many
inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmer’s meadows armed with their
own scythes—though in no wise obliged to furnish them— even so, Queequeg, for
his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first
wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it
seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not
to seem ignorant about the thing—though in truth he was entirely so, concerning
the precise way in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it;
lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. “Why,”
said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t
the people laugh?”
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it
seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a
large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great
central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand
merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts,
a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain— this commander
Moby-Dick 50

was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young princess just
turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride’s
bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor,
placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his
majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said,—for those people have their
grace as well as we— though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times
look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance
upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest
opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his
consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage
circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and
thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain precedence over a mere
island King, especially in the King’s own house— the Captain coolly proceeds to
wash his hands in the punch bowl;— taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass.
“Now,” said Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our people laugh?”
At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting
sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces
of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and
mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the
world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others
came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to
melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most
perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only
begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the
intolerableness of all earthly effort.
Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss
tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed
that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!— that common highway all
over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the
magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.
At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His
dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew,
and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her bows
as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn
tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes.
So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that
for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like
assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as
though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But
there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must
have come from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these
young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin’s hour of
doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms,
and by an almost miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into
the air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with
bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted
his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.
“Capting! Capting! yelled the bumpkin, running toward that officer; “Capting,
Capting, here’s the devil.”

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Moby-Dick 51

“Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to Queequeg,
“what in thunder do you mean by that? Don’t you know you might have killed that
chap?”
“What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
“He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,” pointing to the still
shivering greenhorn.
“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of
disdain, “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg
kill-e big whale!”
“Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any more
of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his
own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet,
and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping
the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so
roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching
at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again,
almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of snapping
into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done; those
on deck rushed toward the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the lower
jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped
deftly to his knees, and crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope,
secured one end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it
round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that
way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and while the
hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted
from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was
seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by
turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the
grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone
down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an
instant’s glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down
and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out,
and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The
poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain
begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till
poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all
deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked
for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry
clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those
around him, seemed to be saying to himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all
meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.”

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Chapter XIV
Nantucket

Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine run,
we safely arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world
it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone
lighthouse. Look at it— a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a
background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a
substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to
plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that
they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of
wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people
there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time;
that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that
they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so
shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island
of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be
found adhering as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show
that Nantucket is no Illinois.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the
red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the
New England coast and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament
the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved
to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage
they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,— the poor
little Indian’s skeleton.
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to
the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quahogs in the sand; grown
bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off
in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea,
explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it;
peeped in at Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting
war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous
and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea, Mastodon, clothed with such
portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded
than his most fearless and malicious assaults!
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their
Moby-Dick 53

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

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Chapter XV
Chowder

It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to anchor, and
Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business that day, at least
none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us
to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor
of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that
Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he plainly
hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the
directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand
till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard
hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask
the first man we met where the place was; these crooked directions of his very
much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the
yellow warehouse— our first point of departure—must be left on the larboard hand,
whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by
dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable
inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no
mistaking.
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears, swung
from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The
horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast
looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at
the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort
of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two of them,
one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper
upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s
chapel, and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last
throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?
I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow
hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp
swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk
scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.
“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”
“Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”
And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs.
Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our
Moby-Dick 55

desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the
present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread with the
relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said—“Clam or Cod?”
“What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness.
“Clam or Cod?” she repeated.
“A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?” says
I, “but that’s a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain’t it, Mrs.
Hussey?”
But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple shirt who
was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word “clam,”
Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out
“clam for two,” disappeared.
“Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper for us both on
one clam?”
However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently
cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery
was delightfully explained. Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small
juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits,
and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and
plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the
frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before
him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great
expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey’s clam
and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the
kitchen door, I uttered the word “cod” with great emphasis, and resumed my seat.
In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor,
and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.
We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself,
I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What’s that stultifying saying
about chowder-headed people? “But look, Queequeg, ain’t that a live eel in your
bowl? Where’s your harpoon?”
Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the
pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for
dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through
your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey
wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account
books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too,
which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along
the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s brindled cow feeding on fish
remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod’s decapitated head,
looking very slipshod, I assure ye.
Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey con-
cerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede me up the
stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed
no harpoon in her chambers. “Why not? said I; “every true whaleman sleeps with
his harpoon— but why not?” “Because it’s dangerous,” says she. “Ever since young
Stiggs coming from that unfort’nt v’y’ge of his, when he was gone four years and
a half, with only three barrels of ile, was found dead in my first floor back, with
his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich dangerous

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Moby-Dick 56

weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg” (for she had learned his name),
“I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you till morning. But the chowder;
clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?”
“Both,” says I; “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety.”

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Chapter XVI
The Ship

In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no small con-
cern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been diligently consulting
Yojo—the name of his black little god— and Yojo had told him two or three times
over, and strongly insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our going together
among the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this,
I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with
me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to do so, had already
pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should infallibly light
upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I
must immediately ship myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.
I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great confi-
dence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising forecast of things; and
cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good sort of god, who perhaps
meant well enough upon the whole, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent
designs.
Now, this plan of Queequeg’s or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection of our craft;
I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied on Queequeg’s sagacity to
point out the whaler best fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my
remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and
accordingly prepared to set about this business with a determined rushing sort of
energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that trifling little affair. Next morning
early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little bedroom—for it seemed that
it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer
with Queequeg and Yojo that day; how it was I never could find out, for, though I
applied myself to it several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX
Articles— leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming
himself at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After
much prolonged sauntering, and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were
three ships up for three-years’ voyages—The Devil-Dam the Tit-bit, and the Pequod.
Devil-dam, I do not know the origin of; Tit-bit is obvious; Pequod you will no doubt
remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct
as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-Dam; from her, hopped
over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a
moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;— square-
Moby-Dick 58

toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but
take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old
Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-
fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the
typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like
a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable
bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where
her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like
the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and
wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where
Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous
features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had
followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded
another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal
owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had
built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both
of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved
buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his
neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal
of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her
unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long
sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen
thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but
deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend
helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved
from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered
by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by
clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things
are touched with that.
Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority, in
order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw nobody; but I
could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little
behind the main-mast. It seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a
conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black
bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale. Planted
with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually
sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose
hairy fibres waved to and fro like a top-knot on some old Pottowotamie Sachem’s
head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider
commanded a complete view forward.
And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his
aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship’s work
suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command. He was seated
on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving; and the
bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which
the wigwam was constructed.
There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the
elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily
rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there was a fine and

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almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes,
which must have arisen from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always
looking to windward;— for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
“Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” said I, advancing to the door of the tent.
“Supposing it be the Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?” he
demanded.
“I was thinking of shipping.”
“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer— ever been in a stove
boat?”
“No, Sir, I never have.”
“Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?
“Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn.
I’ve been several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that-”
“Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?—I’ll
take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the merchant service to me
again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having
served in those marchant ships. But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a
whaling, eh?—it looks a little suspicious, don’t it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast
thou?— Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of murdering
the officers when thou gettest to sea?”
I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of these half
humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer,
was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they
hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard.
“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping
ye.”
“Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
“Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”
“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”
“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”
“I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.”
“Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to, young man.
It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and
supplied with all her needs, including crew. We are part owners and agents. But as
I was going to say, if thou wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I
can put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out.
Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg.”
“What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?”
“Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up,
crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!—ah, ah!”
I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty
grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could, “What you say
is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know there was any peculiar ferocity
in that particular whale, though indeed I might have inferred as much from the
simple fact of the accident.”
“Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see; thou dost not talk
shark a bit. Sure, ye’ve been to sea before now; sure of that?”
“Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the merchant-”

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“Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant service— don’t
aggravate me—I won’t have it. But let us understand each other. I have given thee
a hint about what whaling is! do ye yet feel inclined for it?”
“I do, sir.”
“Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat,
and then jump after it? Answer, quick!”
“I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid of, that
is; which I don’t take to be the fact.”
“Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by
experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world? Was
not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just step forward there, and take a
peep over the weather bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there.”
For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly
how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow’s
feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand.
Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship
swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards
the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and
forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.
“Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what did ye see?”
“Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and
there’s a squall coming up, I think.”
“Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round
Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where you stand?”
I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the Pequod
was as good a ship as any—I thought the best— and all this I now repeated to Peleg.
Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness to ship me.
“And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he added—“come along with
ye.” And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.
Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising
figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad who along with Captain Peleg was one of
the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these
ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and
chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or
a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels,
the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.
Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the
island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants
in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only
variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous.
For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-
hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture
names—a singularly common fashion on the island— and in childhood naturally
imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the
audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely
blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these
things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a

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ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-
watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the
north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s
sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding
breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn
a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes one in a whole nation’s census—
a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract
from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have
what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all
men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O
young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do
with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar,
it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual
circumstances.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But
unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and
indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles—Captain
Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of
Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many
unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native
born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest. Still, for
all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy
Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against
land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and
though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat,
spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening
of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not
know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long
since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing,
and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a
little cabin boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad
shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief mate, and captain,
and finally a shipowner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous
career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating
his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old
hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in
Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old
Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to
the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker,
he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,
though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel,
unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his
drab-colored eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you
could clutch something—a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at
something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished from before
him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his
long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a
soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.

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Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I followed
Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks was small; and
there, bolt upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so, and never leaned, and this
to save his coat-tails. His broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly
crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he
seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.
“Bildad,” cried Captain Peleg, “at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying
those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain knowledge. How far ye
got, Bildad?”
As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, Bildad, without
noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and seeing me, glanced again
inquiringly towards Peleg.
“He says he’s our man, Bildad,” said Peleg, “he wants to ship.”
“Dost thee?” said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
“I dost,” said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
“What do ye think of him, Bildad?” said Peleg.
“He’ll do,” said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book in
a mumbling tone quite audible.
I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg, his friend
and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said nothing, only looking round
me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest, and drawing forth the ship’s articles,
placed pen and ink before him, and seated himself at a little table. I began to think
it was high time to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for
the voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages;
but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called
lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining
to the respective duties of the ship’s company. I was also aware that being a green
hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very large; but considering that I was
used to the sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that
from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th
part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount
to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better
than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing
I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years’ beef and board, for which I
would not have to pay one stiver.
It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely for-
tune—and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those that never take
on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and
lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the
whole, I thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not have
been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered
make.
But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about receiving
a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard something of both
Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad; how that they being the
principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore the other and more inconsiderable and
scattered owners, left nearly the whole management of the ship’s affairs to these
two. And I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal
to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod,

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quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own fireside.
Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad,
to my no small surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these
proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his
book, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth-”
“Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what lay shall we give
this young man?”
“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and seventy-
seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it?—‘where moth and rust do corrupt, but
lay-‘”
Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and seventy-seventh!
Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one, shall not lay up many lays
here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay that,
indeed; and though from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a
landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and
seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of
it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a
farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons;
and so I thought at the time.
“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, Thou dost not want to swindle this
young man! he must have more than that.”
“Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes;
and then went on mumbling—“for where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also.”
“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, “do ye hear
that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”
Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, “Captain
Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest to
the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans, many of them— and that if we
too abundantly reward the labors of this young man, we may be taking the bread
from those widows and those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay,
Captain Peleg.”
“Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. “Blast
ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now
had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest
ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.”
“Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be drawing ten inches
of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man, Captain
Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink
thee foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.”
“Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye insult me.
It’s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he’s bound to hell. Flukes
and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start my soulbolts, but I’ll—I’ll—yes,
I’ll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting,
drab-colored son of a wooden gun—a straight wake with ye!”
As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous oblique,
sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.
Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and responsible
owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all idea of sailing in a vessel so

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questionably owned and temporarily commanded, I stepped aside from the door to
give egress to Bildad, who, I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before
the awakened wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the
transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of withdrawing.
He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As for Peleg, after letting
off his rage as he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a
lamb, though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. “Whew!” he whistled
at last—“the squall’s gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at
sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone.
That’s he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man, Ishmael’s thy name, didn’t
ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth lay.”
“Captain Peleg,” said I, “I have a friend with me who wants to ship too— shall I
bring him down to-morrow?”
“To be sure,” said Peleg. “Fetch him along, and we’ll look at him.”
“What lay does he want?” groaned Bildad, glancing up from the Book in which he
had again been burying himself.
“Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,” said Peleg. “Has he ever whaled it
any?” turning to me.
“Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.”
“Well, bring him along then.”
And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had done
a good morning’s work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship that Yojo had
provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.
But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain with
whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many cases, a
whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all her crew on board, ere the
captain makes himself visible by arriving to take command; for sometimes these
voyages are so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief,
that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he
does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners
till all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at him before
irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back I accosted Captain
Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
“And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art
shipped.”
“Yes, but I should like to see him.”
“But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly what’s the
matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t
look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either. Any how, young man, he
won’t always see me, so I don’t suppose he will thee. He’s a queer man, Captain
Ahab— so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no fear,
no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much;
but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s
above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals; been
used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger
foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle!
Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and
Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!”
“And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not

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lick his blood?”

“Come hither to me—hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance in his eye
that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod. Never
say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself .’Twas a foolish, ignorant
whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth
old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow
prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to
warn thee. It’s a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed with him as mate years
ago; I know what he is— a good man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a
swearing good man—something like me—only there’s a good deal more of him. Aye,
aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home he
was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his
bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that
ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of
moody— desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And
once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a
moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee—and wrong not
Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has
a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that
sweet girl that old man had a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless
harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”
As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally re-
vealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness
concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him,
but for I don’t know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also
felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was
not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did not disincline
me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so
imperfectly as he was known to me then. However, my thoughts were at length
carried in other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.

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Chapter XVII
The Ramadan

As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did
not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect
towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not
find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-
stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of
footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of
a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet
owned and rented in his name.
I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things,
and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not,
because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now,
certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;— but
what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed
to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let
him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—
for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must
be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried to open
it, but it was fastened inside. “Queequeg,” said I softly through the key-hole:—all
silent. “I say, Queequeg! why don’t you speak? It’s I—Ishmael.” But all remained
still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time;
I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but
the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a
crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line
of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall the
wooden shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had
taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That’s strange, thought I; but
at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad
without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.
“Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. Something must have happened. Apoplexy!
I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted. Running down stairs, I
quickly stated my suspicions to the first person I met—the chamber-maid. “La! la!”
she cried, “I thought something must be the matter. I went to make the bed after
breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s been just
so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your
Moby-Dick 67

baggage in for safe keeping. La! La, ma’am!—Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey!
apoplexy!”—and with these cries she ran towards the kitchen, I following.
Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet
in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the castors,
and scolding her little black boy meantime.
“Wood-house!” cried I, “which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch something
to pry open the door—the axe!—the axe! he’s had a stroke; depend upon it!”—and
so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs.
Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her
countenance.
“What’s the matter with you, young man?”
“Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open!”
“Look here,” said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as
to have one hand free; “look here; are you talking about prying open any of my
doors?”— and with that she seized my arm. “What’s the matter with you? What’s
the matter with you, shipmate?”
In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the whole
case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her nose, she rumi-
nated for an instant; then exclaimed—“No! I haven’t seen it since I put it there.”
Running to a little closet under the landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and re-
turning, told me that Queequeg’s harpoon was missing. “He’s killed himself,” she
cried. “It’s unfort’nate Stiggs done over again there goes another counterpane—God
pity his poor mother!— it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister?
Where’s that girl?—there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me
a sign, with—“no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;”—might
as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What’s that
noise there? You, young man, avast there!”
And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the
door.
“I won’t allow it; I won’t have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith, there’s
one about a mile from here. But avast!” putting her hand in her side pocket, “here’s
a key that’ll fit, I guess; let’s see.” And with that, she turned it in the lock; but alas!
Queequeg’s supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.
“Have to burst it open,” said I, and was running down the entry a little, for a
good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing I should not break down
her premises; but I tore from her, and with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full
against the mark.
With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the
wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg,
altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of the room; squatting on his
hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other
way but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.
“Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, “Queequeg, what’s the matter with you?”
“He hain’t been a sittin’ so all day, has he?” said the landlady.
But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt like pushing
him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost intolerable, it seemed so
painfully and unnaturally constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been
sitting so for upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.
“Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s alive at all events; so leave us, if you please, and I

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Moby-Dick 68

will see to this strange affair myself.”

Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to
take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could do—for all my polite arts
and blandishments— he would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look
at me, nor notice my presence in any the slightest way.
I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast on
their hams that way in his native island. It must be so; yes, it’s a part of his creed, I
suppose; well, then, let him rest; he’ll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can’t last
for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don’t believe
it’s very punctual then.
I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long stories of
some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it (that
is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in
the Atlantic Ocean only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven
o’clock, I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was just
where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow vexed with him; it
seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all day and half the
night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head.
“For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have some
supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself, Queequeg.” But not a word did he reply.
Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt,
before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to turning in, I took my
heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night;
and he had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would,
I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere
thought of Queequeg— not four feet off—sitting there in that uneasy position, stark
alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of it; sleeping
all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary,
unaccountable Ramadan!
But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of day;
when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he had been screwed
down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he
got, with stiff and grating joints, but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where
I lay; pressed his forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.
Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what
it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because
that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really
frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours
an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual
aside and argue the point with him.
And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I, “get into bed now, and
lie and listen to me.” I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress of the
primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the present time,
during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and
prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for
the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene
and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely
sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him

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Moby-Dick 69

now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued
I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born
of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic
religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word,
Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested
apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias
nurtured by Ramadans.
I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia;
expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no; only upon
one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his father the king on
the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about
two o’clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.
“No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew the inferences
without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had visited that very
island, and he told me that it was the custom, when a great battle had been gained
there, to barbecue all the slain in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by
one, they were placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau,
with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent
round with the victor’s compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents
were so many Christmas turkeys.
After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much impression
upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on
that important subject, unless considered from his own point of view; and, in the
second place, he did not more than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply
as I would; and, finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the
true religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and
compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man
should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty break-
fast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by
reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and
picking our teeth with halibut bones.

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Chapter XVIII
His Mark

As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying
his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam,
saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing
that he let no cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their
papers.
“What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping on the bulwarks,
and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
“I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”
“Yes,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from behind
Peleg’s, out of the wigwam. “He must show that he’s converted. Son of darkness,” he
added, turning to Queequeg, “art thou at present in communion with any Christian
church?”
“Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the first Congregational Church.” Here be it said,
that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted
into the churches.
“First Congregational Church,” cried Bildad, “what! that worships in Deacon
Deuteronomy Coleman’s meeting-house?” and so saying, taking out his spectacles,
he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and putting them on
very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took
a good long look at Queequeg.
“How long hath he been a member?” he then said, turning to me; “not very long,
I rather guess, young man.”
“No,” said Peleg, “and he hasn’t been baptized right either, or it would have
washed some of that devil’s blue off his face.”
“Do tell, now,” cried Bildad, “is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon
Deuteronomy’s meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord’s
day.”
“I don’t know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,” said I; “all I
know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First Congregational Church.
He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.”
“Young man,” said Bildad sternly, “thou art skylarking with me— explain thyself,
thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me.”
Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied, “I mean, sir, the same ancient
Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here,
and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting
Moby-Dick 71

First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some
of us cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in that we all
join hands.”
“Splice, thou mean’st splice hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer. “Young man,
you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a
better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy—why Father Mapple himself couldn’t beat it,
and he’s reckoned something. Come aboard, come aboard: never mind about the
papers. I say, tell Quohog there— what’s that you call him? tell Quohog to step
along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff that;
and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever
stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?”
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the
bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side;
and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way
as this:—
“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose
him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right
over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s decks, and struck the glistening
tar spot out of sight.
“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly, hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye; why,
dad whale dead.”
“Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the
flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. “Quick, I say, you Bildad,
and get the ship’s papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one
of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we’ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than
ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.”
So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled
among the same ship’s company to which I myself belonged.
When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for signing,
he turned to me and said, “I guess, Quohog there don’t know how to write, does he?
I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy mark?
But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part in
similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen, copied
upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round figure
which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain Peleg’s obstinate mistake
touching his appellative, it stood something like this:—
Quohog.
his X mark.
Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and
at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his broadskirted drab
coat took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one entitled “The Latter Day Coming;
or No Time to Lose,” placed it in Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping them and
the book with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, “Son of darkness, I
must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the
souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I
beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the
hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness
gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!”
Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language, heterogeneously

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Moby-Dick 72

mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.

“Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer, cried Peleg.
“Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers— it takes the shark out of ’em; no
harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine,
once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the
meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that
he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got
stove and went to Davy Jones.”
“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou thyself, as I myself,
hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have the fear of
death; how, then, can’st thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own
heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard
in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain
Ahab, did’st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?”
“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and thrusting
his hands far down into his pockets,—“hear him, all of ye. Think of that! When
every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and the Judgment then?
What? With all three masts making such an everlasting thundering against the
side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment
then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I
was thinking of; and how to save all hands how to rig jury-masts how to get into the
nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.”
Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we
followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were
mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he stooped to pick up a patch, or
save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise might have been wasted.

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Chapter XIX
The Prophet

“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”

Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the
water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words
were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his massive forefinger
at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and
patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent
smallpox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated
ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.
“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little more time
for an uninterrupted look at him.
“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole arm and
then rapidly shoving it straight out from him-, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed
finger darted full at the object.
“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”
“Anything down there about your souls?”
“About what?”
“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I know
many chaps that hav’n’t got any,— good luck to ’em; and they are all the better off
for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”
“What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.
“He’s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other
chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the word he.
“Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he’s
talking about something and somebody we don’t know.”
“Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old Thunder yet, have
ye?”
“Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his
manner.
“Captain Ahab.”
“What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”
“Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav’n’t seen
him yet, have ye?”
“No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be all right
again before long.”
Moby-Dick 74

“All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort
of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will
be all right; not before.”
“What do you know about him?”
“What did they tell you about him? Say that!”
“They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that he’s a good
whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.”
“That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he
gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the word with Captain Ahab.
But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when
he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage
with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?— heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing
about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last
voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about them matters and
something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not
all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve heard tell about the leg, and
how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh, yes, that every one knows
a’most—I mean they know he’s only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other
off.”
“My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don’t know, and I
don’t much care; for it seems to me that you must be a little damaged in the head.
But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me
tell you, that I know all about the loss of his leg.”
“All about it, eh—sure you do? all?
“Pretty sure.”
With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger stood
a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and said:—“Ye’ve
shipped, have ye? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed;
and what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all. Any how,
it’s all fixed and arranged a’ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I
suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity ’em! Morning to ye, shipmates,
morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I’m sorry I stopped ye.”
“Look here, friend,” said I, “if you have anything important to tell us, out with it;
but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game; that’s all
I have to say.”
“And it’s said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are just
the man for him—the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning! Oh! when ye
get there, tell ’em I’ve concluded not to make one of ’em.”
“Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way—you can’t fool us. It is the easiest
thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.”
“Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.”
“Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, Queequeg, let’s leave this crazy man. But
stop, tell me your name, will you?”
“Elijah.”
Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other’s
fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug,
trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a hundred yards, when
chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did so, who should be seen but
Elijah following us, though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me

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Moby-Dick 75

so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my
comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner that
we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging us, but with what
intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his
ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all
kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the
Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the
silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the
day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound
ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.
I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really dogging
us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and on that side
of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without seeming to notice us. This
relieved me; and once more, and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my
heart, a humbug.

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Chapter XX
All Astir

A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not only were
the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas,
and coils of rigging; in short, everything betokened that the ship’s preparations
were hurrying to a close. Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his
wigwam keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing
and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging
were working till long after night-fall.
On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was given at all the
inns where the ship’s company were stopping, that their chests must be on board
before night, for there was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So
Queequeg and I got down our traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last.
But it seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not
sail for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and there is
no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully equipped.
Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives and forks,
shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are indispensable to the
business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which necessitates a three-years’
housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors,
bakers, and bankers. And though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not
by any means to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of
the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery,
and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented,
it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to
accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the very things
upon which the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare
spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare
Captain and duplicate ship.
At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had
been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and
staves. But, as before hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and
carrying on board of divers odds and ends of things, both large and small.
Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad’s
sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very
kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she could help it, nothing should be found
wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come
Moby-Dick 77

on board with a jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch
of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a roll of
flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic back. Never did any woman better
deserve her name, which was Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And
like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and
thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety,
comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad
was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.
But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as
she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling
lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As
for Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles needed, and at every
fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once
in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men down
the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then concluded by
roaring back into his wigwam.
During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as
often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come
on board his ship. To these questions they would answer, that he was getting better
and better, and was expected aboard every day; meantime, the two Captains, Peleg
and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I
had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart
that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without
once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon
as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong,
it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly
strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with
me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.
At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would certainly sail. So
next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.

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Chapter XXI
Going Aboard

It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh
the wharf.
“There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I to Queequeg,
“it can’t be shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess; come on!”
“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid
a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood
stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg
to me. It was Elijah.
“Going aboard?”
“Hands off, will you,” said I.
“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way!”
“Aint going aboard, then?”
“Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah,
that I consider you a little impertinent?”
“No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking
from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.
“Elijah,” said I, “you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going
to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained.”
“Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?”
“He’s cracked, Queequeg,” said I, “come on.”
“Holloa!” cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces.
“Never mind him,” said I, “Queequeg, come on.”
But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder,
said—“Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that ship a while ago?”
Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, “Yes, I thought I
did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.”
“Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.”
Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and touching
my shoulder again, said, “See if you can find ’em now, will ye?
“Find who?”
“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was going
to warn ye against—but never mind, never mind— it’s all one, all in the family
too;—sharp frost this morning, ain’t it? Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very
soon, I guess; unless it’s before the Grand Jury.” And with these cracked words he
Moby-Dick 79

finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic
impudence.
At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound quiet, not
a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the hatches were all on, and
lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of
the scuttle open. Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there,
wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests,
his face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept
upon him.
“Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?” said I, looking
dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf, Queequeg had not
at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would have thought myself to have
been optically deceived in that matter, were it not for Elijah’s otherwise inexplicable
question. But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted
to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish
himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper’s rear, as though feeling if it
was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.
“Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” said I.
“Oh; perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, “my country way; won’t hurt him face.”
“Face!” said I, “call that his face? very benevolent countenance then; but how hard
he breathes, he’s heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you are heavy, it’s grinding the
face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, he’ll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don’t
wake.”
Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his
tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from
one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg
gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of
all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening
some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that
respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the
piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion; much better
than those garden-chairs which are convertible into walking sticks; upon occasion,
a chief calling his attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a
spreading tree, perhaps in some damp marshy place.
While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk from
me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s head.
“What’s that for, Queequeg?”
“Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!
He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe which,
it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his soul, when we
were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The strong vapor now completely
filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of
muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice;
then sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who be ye smokers?”
“Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?”
“Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain came aboard
last night.”
“What Captain?—Ahab?”

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Moby-Dick 80

“Who but him indeed?”

I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard
a noise on deck.
“Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief mate that; good
man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to.” And so saying he went on deck,
and we followed.
It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the
riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and several of the
shore people were busy in bringing various last things on board. Meanwhile Captain
Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin.

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Chapter XXII
Merry Christmas

At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s riggers, and after the
Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity
had come off in a whale-boat, with her last gift— a nightcap for Stubb, the second
mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward—after all this, the two
Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate,
Peleg said:
“Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is all
ready—just spoke to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh? Well, call all
hands, then. Muster ’em aft here—blast ’em!”
“No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,” said Bildad, “but
away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.”
How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and
Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if they
were to be joint-commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for
Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen; Only, they said he was in the cabin.
But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the
ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at all his
proper business, but the pilot’s; and as he was not yet completely recovered—so they
said—therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed natural enough;
especially as in the merchant service many captains never show themselves on deck
for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table,
having a farewell merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship
for good with the pilot.
But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was
now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.
“Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast.
“Mr. Starbuck, drive aft.”
“Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone
marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years,
the order to strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the
anchor.
“Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next command, and the
crew sprang for the handspikes.
Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is the
forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition
Moby-Dick 82

to his other offices, was one of the licensed pilots of the port—he being suspected
to have got himself made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the
ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft—Bildad, I say, might
now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor,
and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the hands
at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble
Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told
them that no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in
getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts
in each seaman’s berth.
Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and swore
astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would sink the ship
before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused on my handspike, and
told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we both ran, in starting on
the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with
the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven
hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear,
and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of
withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first kick.
“Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared. “Spring, thou
sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don’t ye spring, I say, all of
ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-
cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!” And
so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely,
while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I, Captain
Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short,
cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves
almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in
polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight;
and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended
from the bows.
Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft
deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the
winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard,—
“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,
Stand dressed in living green.
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.”
Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were
full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic,
spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a
pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass
shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.
At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The
stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging alongside.
It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this
juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for
good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond both stormy Capes;

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Moby-Dick 83

a ship in which some thousands of his hardearned dollars were invested; a ship,
in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more
starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to
a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,— poor old Bildad lingered
long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another
farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards
the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents;
looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and
nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped
stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing
heroically in his face, as much as to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it;
yes, I can.”
As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his philosophy,
there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came too near. And he, too,
did not a little run from the cabin to deck—now a word below, and now a word with
Starbuck, the chief mate.
But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him,—“Captain
Bildad—come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the mainyard there! Boat ahoy!
Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful, careful!—come, Bildad, boy— say
your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck—luck to ye, Mr. Stubb— luck to ye, Mr. Flask—good-
bye and good luck to ye all— and this day three years I’ll have a hot supper smoking
for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!”
“God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured old Bildad,
almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may
soon be moving among ye—a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye’ll have plenty of
them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the
boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent
within the year. Don’t forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper
don’t waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the green locker. Don’t
whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s
rejecting Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was
a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication.
Good-bye, good-bye! Don’t keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck;
it’ll spoil. Be careful with the butter—twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye,
if—”
“Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!” and with that, Peleg
hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming
gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers,
and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

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Chapter XXIII
The Lee Shore

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner,
encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into
the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington!
I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter
just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off
again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet.
Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs;
this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that
it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the
leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is
safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our
mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she
must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make
her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore;
in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks
all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril;
her only friend her bitterest foe!
Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable
truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the
open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire
to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as
God—so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed
upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven
crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take
heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-
perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
Chapter XXIV
The Advocate

As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this
business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather
unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye
landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.
In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact,
that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level
with what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into
any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general
opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and
if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm
Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed preeminently
presuming and ridiculous.
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen,
is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of
business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner
of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of
the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably
delights to honor. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business,
ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown,
and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least
among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in
question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable
to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return
to drink in all ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the
popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran
who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the
sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the
comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders
of God!
But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us
the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers,
lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to
our glory!
But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we
whalemen are, and have been.
Moby-Dick 86

Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why
did Louis XVI of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from
Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own
island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her
whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000 pounds? And lastly, how comes it that
we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in
the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen
thousand men; yearly consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the
time of sailing, 20,000,000 dollars; and every year importing into our harbors a
well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars. How comes all this, if there be not
something puissant in whaling?
But this is not the half; look again.
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out
one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more
potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high
and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events
so remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential
issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless
task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past the
whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts
of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where
no Cooke or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and European men-of-war
now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and
glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of
Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes, Your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of
anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater,
than your Cooke and your Krusenstern. For in their succorless empty-handedness,
they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin
islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and
muskets would not willingly have willingly dared. All that is made such a flourish
of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces
of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three
chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship’s common
log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!
Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely
any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of
the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whalemen who first
broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and,
if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last
eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain,
and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the
enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a
Dutchman, all other ships, long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous;
but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now
mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the
emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the

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Moby-Dick 87

whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all
Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that
cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the
primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan,
is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be
due; for already she is on the threshold.
But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no aesthetically
noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you
there, and unhorse you with a split helmet every time.
The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.
The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the
first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job? And who composed the first
narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great,
who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-
hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who,
but Edmund Burke!
True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no good
blood in their veins.
No good blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there.
The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage,
Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line
of Folgers and harpooneers—all kith and kin to noble Benjamin— this day darting
the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the
whale is declared “a royal fish.”
Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand
imposing way.
The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty
triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world’s capital, the bones
of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous
object in the cymballed procession.*
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
Grant it, since you cite it; but say what you will, there is no real dignity in
whaling.
No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus
is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the
Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime has
taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account that man more honorable than that
great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing
in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world
which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything
that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at
my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in
my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling;
for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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Chapter XXV
Postscript

In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated
facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a
not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause—such an
advocate, would he not be blame-worthy?
It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a
certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There
is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state. How they use the
salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly
oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it
with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might
be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in
common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair,
and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hairoil,
unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As
a general rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality.
But the only thing to be considered here is this—what kind of oil is used at
coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor
bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but the sperm
oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with
coronation stuff!
Chapter XXVI
Knights and Squires

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker
by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed
well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit.
Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must
have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those
fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he
seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares,
than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation
of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight
skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner
health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to
endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow
or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do
well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering
images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid,
steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and
not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there
were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed
well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman,
and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life
did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition,
which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence
than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if
at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away
domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more
from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those
latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil
daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I
will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this,
he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that
which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly
fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
“Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as careful a man
as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall ere long see what that word
Moby-Dick 90

“careful” precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale
hunter.
Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a
thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions.
Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one
of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be
foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down;
nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For,
thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and
not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed
Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father’s? Where, in the bottomless
deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?
With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain superstitious-
ness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck, which could, nevertheless,
still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it was not in reasonable nature
that a man so organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as
he had; it was not in nature that these things should fail in latently engendering
an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from
its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was
that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally
abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary
irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because
more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of
an enraged and mighty man.
But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement
of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a
thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men
may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and
murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but, man, in the
ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over
any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest
robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that
it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest
anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at
such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting
stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but
that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining
in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on
all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The
centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter
ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the
most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift
himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some
ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against
all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one
royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic
God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl;
Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and

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Moby-Dick 91

paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the
pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than
a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest
champions from the kingly commoners; bear me out in it, O God!

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Chapter XXVII
Knights and Squires

Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according
to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor
valiant; taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the
most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman
joiner engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over
his whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all
invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangements of his part
of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to
the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly
and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old
rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage
had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought
of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a
question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable
dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to
tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out
when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing
man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers,
all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost
impious good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his
short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would almost
as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his
pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy
reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession,
lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be
in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his
trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least of his peculiar
disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is
terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have
died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some people go about with a cam-
phorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations,
Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A short,
Moby-Dick 93

stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed
to think that the great Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him;
and therefore it was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever
encountered. So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of
their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous
whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a
little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill
and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish
in the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years’
voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a
carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be
similarly divided. Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight
and last long. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form,
he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic
whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted into it,
serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those battering seas.
Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, were momentous men. They
it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod’s boats as
headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahab would probably
marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these three headsmen were as captains
of companies. Or, being armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a
picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight
of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain
conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly
twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between
the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place
we set down who the Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of
them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected for his
squire. But Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a
village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket
with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the
generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones,
and black rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic
in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of
the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New
England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But
no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son
fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his
lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the
earlier Puritans and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the
Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage,
with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were

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Moby-Dick 94

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

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Chapter XXVIII
Ahab

For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of Captain
Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches, and for aught that
could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship;
only they sometimes issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory,
that after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme
lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to
penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed aft
to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the
unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea became almost a perturbation. This
was strangely heightened at times by the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences
uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived
of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready
to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves.
But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness—to call it so— which I felt,
yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all warranty
to cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the
crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame
merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me acquainted
with, still I ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness of the
very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly
embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship,
the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to allay these colorless misgivings,
and induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three
better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way, could not
readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a
Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out
her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running
away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which
we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather
behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough
mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the
water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted
to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards
the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain
Moby-Dick 96

Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.

There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from
any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly
wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from
their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid
bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading
its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his
tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender
rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes
made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly
darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark
from top to bottom ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive,
but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar
left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent,
throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates.
But once Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously
asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded,
and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental
strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey
Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of
Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-
traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with
preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted
him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out— which
might hardly come to pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last office
for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand
which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of
this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly
stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned
from the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,”
said the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.”
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the
Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger
hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in
that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect,
looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity
of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and
fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers
say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they
plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled
master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a
crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty
woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that
morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or
seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less
gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse;

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as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of
the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was
almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on
the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the
Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling
preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there
was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase
away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his
brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, hol-
iday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For,
as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry,
misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will
at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such gladhearted visitants;
so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air.
More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other
man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.

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Chapter XXIX
Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb

Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling
through the bright Quito spring, which at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the
threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing
perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet,
heaped up— flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed
haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of
their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ’twas
hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the
witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies
to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still
mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most
forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they
wrought on Ahab’s texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to
do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards
will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab;
only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking,
his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like
going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an old captain like
me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth.”
So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and
the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was
to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but
with some cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering
shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the
silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would
emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering
touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained from
patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six
inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of
that bony step, that their dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks.
But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy,
lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the
old second mate, came up from below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating
humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then,
Moby-Dick 99

no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting
something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into
it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.
“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that fashion?
But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep
between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.—Down, dog, and kennel!”
Starting at the unforeseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful
old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I am not used to be
spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir.”
“Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to
avoid some passionate temptation.
“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a dog, sir.”
“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I’ll
clear the world of thee!”
As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his
aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered Stubb,
as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s very queer. Stop, Stubb;
somehow, now, I don’t well know whether to go back and strike him, or—what’s
that?— down here on my knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the thought coming
up in me; but it would be the first time I ever did pray. It’s queer; very queer; and
he’s queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he’s about the queerest old man Stubb
ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!—his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad!
Anyway there’s something’s on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a
deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the
twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me
that of a morning he always finds the old man’s hammock clothes all rumpled and
tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots,
and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot
old man! I guess he’s got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind of
Tic-Dolly-row they say— worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don’t know what it is,
but the Lord keep me from catching it. He’s full of riddles; I wonder what he goes
into the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that
for, I should like to know? Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t
that queer, now? But there’s no telling, it’s the old game— Here goes for a snooze.
Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right
asleep. And now that I think of it, that’s about the first thing babies do, and that’s
a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em. But
that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep
when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes again. But how’s that? didn’t he call me
a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of
that! He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he did kick me,
and I didn’t observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed
like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with me? I don’t stand right on
my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out. By
the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though—How? how? how?— but the only
way’s to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I’ll see how
this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight.”

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Chapter XXX
The Pipe

When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and
then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him
below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp
and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated,
saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then,
seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized?
For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was
Ahab.
Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in
quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How now,” he
soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my
pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously
toiling, not pleasuring— aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to
windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets
were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This
thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white
hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I’ll smoke no more-”
He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the
same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat,
Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
Chapter XXXI
Queen Mab

Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.

“Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s ivory leg,
well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my
little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and
I like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask—you
know how curious all dreams are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow
seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that
kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s not a real leg, only a false
one.’ And there’s a mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump.
That’s what makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear
than a blow from a cane. The living member— that makes the living insult, my
little man. And thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly
toes against that cursed pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the
while, I say, I was thinking to myself, ‘what’s his leg now, but a cane-. a whale-bone
cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it was only a playful cudgelling—in fact, only a whaleboning
that he gave me— not a base kick. Besides,’ thinks I, ‘look at it once; why, the end of
it—the foot part—what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer
kicked me, there’s a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled down to a point
only.’ But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I was battering
away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back,
takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round. ‘What are you ‘bout?’ says he. Slid!
man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over
the fright. ‘What am I about?’ says I at last. ‘And what business is that of yours, I
should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do you want a kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had
no sooner said that, than he turned round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging
up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout—what do you think, I saw?—why thunder
alive, man, his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I on
second thought, ‘I guess I won’t kick you, old fellow.’ ‘Wise Stubb,’ said he, ‘wise
Stubb;’ and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like
a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to stop saying over his ‘wise Stubb, wise
Stubb,’ I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I had only
just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, ‘Stop that kicking!’ ‘Halloa,’ says I,
‘what’s the matter now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye here,’ says he; ‘let’s argue the insult.
Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I—‘right here it was.’ ‘Very
good,’ says he—‘he used his ivory leg, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I. ‘Well then,’
Moby-Dick 102

says he, ‘wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn’t he kick with right good
will? it wasn’t a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked
by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It’s an honor; I consider it
an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it great glory
to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb,
that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say;
be kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back; for you
can’t help yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t you see that pyramid?’ With that, he all of a
sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored;
rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream,
Flask?”
“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.’”
“May be; may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab standing
there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing you can do, Flask, is to
let the old man alone; never speak to him, whatever he says. Halloa! What’s that he
shouts? Hark!”
“Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!
If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
“What do you think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of something
queer about that, eh? A white whale—did ye mark that, man? Look ye—there’s
something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask. Ahab has that that’s bloody
on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way.”

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Chapter XXXII
Cetology

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its
unshored harborless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s weedy
hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it
is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative
understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts
which are to follow.
It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would
now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents
of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities
have laid down.
“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology,”
says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
“It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the
true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families.... Utter confusion
exists among the historians of this animal” (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D.
1839.
“Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.” “Impenetrable
veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A field strewn with thorns.” “All these
incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists.”
Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those
lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be
little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or
the science of whales. Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen
and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—
The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;
Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten;
Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter;
Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin;
Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all
these have written, the above cited extracts will show.
Of the names in this list of whale authors only those following Owen ever saw
living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman.
I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale,
he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the
great sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy
Moby-Dick 104

mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the
throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of the whales. Yet,
owing to the long priority of his claims, and the profound ignorance which till some
seventy years back, invested the then fabulous and utterly unknown sperm-whale,
and which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific
retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days, will satisfy
you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the
seas. But the time has at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross;
hear ye! good people all,—the Greenland whale is deposed,— the great sperm whale
now reigneth!
There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm
whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the
attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s; both in their time surgeons to
the English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The original
matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily small;
but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific
description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete
in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.
Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive
classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in
all-outward its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to
take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing
complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very
reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description
of the various species, or—in this space at least— to much of any description. My
object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am
the architect, not the builder.
But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal to
it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s hands among
the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful
thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful
tauntings in Job might well appal me. “Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant
with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and
sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am
in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.
First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very
vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point
whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares,
“I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that
down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus’s
express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the
Leviathan.
The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from
the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their
lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis
lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturae jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my
friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine
in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were

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Moby-Dick 105

altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground
that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental
thing settled, the next point is, in what internal respect does the whale differ from
other fish. Above, Linnaeus has given you those items. But in brief they are these:
lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously
to label him for all time to come. To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with
a horizontal tail. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the
result of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is
not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is still more
cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish
familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas,
among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes
a horizontal position.
By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from the
leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the whale by the
best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish hitherto
authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence, all the smaller, spouting and horizontal
tailed fish must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the
grand divisions of the entire whale host.
I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs
(Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists
among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking
in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout,
I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to
quit the Kingdom of Cetology.
First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary books
(subdivisible into chapters), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and
large.
I. The folio whale; II. the octavo whale; III. the Duodecimo whale.
As the type of the folio I present the Sperm Whale; of the octavo, the Grampus;
of the Duodecimo, the Porpoise.
Folios. Among these I here include the following chapters:— I. The Sperm Whale;
II. the Right Whale; III. the Fin Back Whale; IV. the Humpbacked Whale; V. the
Razor Back Whale; VI. the Sulphur Bottom Whale.
Book I. (Folio), chapter I. (Sperm Whale).—This whale, among the English of old
vaguely known as the Trumpa whale and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed
whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and
the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant
of the globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in
aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the only creature
from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities
will, in many other places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I
now have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when
the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and
when his oil was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days
spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature
identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale.

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Moby-Dick 106

It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the
Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In those
times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only
as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you
nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the
true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was still retained by
the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its
scarcity. And so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the
whale from which this spermaceti was really derived.
Book I. (Folio), chapter II. (Right Whale).—In one respect this is the most vener-
able of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It yields the
article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as
“whale oil,” an inferior article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscrimi-
nately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the
Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal
of obscurity concerning the Identity of the species thus multitudinously baptized.
What then is the whale, which I include in the second species of my Folios? It
is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the
English Whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands
Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has
been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the
American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks,
on the Nor’ West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them
Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and
the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand features;
nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a
radical distinction. It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive
differences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.
The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to
elucidating the sperm whale.
Book I. (Folio), chapter III. (Fin-Back).—Under this head I reckon a monster
which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen
almost in every sea and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried
by passengers crossing the Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length
he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a
less portly girth, and a lighter color, approaching to olive. His great lips present a
cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds of large wrinkles. His
grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name, is often a
conspicuous object. This fin is some three or four feet long, growing vertically from
the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end.
Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will,
at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately
calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands
up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the
watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy
hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back
is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy;
always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most

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Moby-Dick 107

sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear
upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming,
as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and
unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From
having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right
whale, among a theoretic species denominated Whalebone whales, that is, whales
with baleen. Of these so-called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several
varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked
whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated
whales, are the fisherman’s names for a few sorts.
In connexion with this appellative of “Whalebone whales,” it is of great importance
to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating
allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear classifica-
tion of the Leviathan, founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth;
notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very obviously seem better
adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other detached
bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen,
hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately
dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be the nature
of their structure in other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale
and the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then
this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen;
but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts
above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular combinations;
or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to
defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of
the whale-naturalists has split.
But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in
his anatomy—there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification. Nay;
what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale’s anatomy more striking
than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to
classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various
leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as available to
the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated. What then remains?
nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and
boldly sort them that way. And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and
it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.
Book I. (Folio) chapter IV. (Hump Back).—This whale is often seen on the northern
American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into harbor.
He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the Elephant
and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular name for him does not sufficiently
distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His
oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted
of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other
of them.
Book I. (Folio), chapter V. ( Razor Back).—Of this whale little is known but his
name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring nature, he eludes
both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, he has never yet shown any part
of him but his back, which rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more

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of him, nor does anybody else.

Book I. (Folio), chapter VI. (Sulphur Bottom).—Another retiring gentleman, with
a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some of
his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at least I have never seen him except
in the remoter southern seas, and then always at too great a distance to study
his countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line.
Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is
true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
Thus ends book I. (Folio), and now begins book II. (Octavo).
OCTAVOES.* These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which at
present may be numbered:—I., the Grampus; II., the Black Fish; III., the Narwhale;
IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.
Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because,
while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former order,
nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder’s
Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the Folio
volume, but the Octavo volume does.
Book II. (Octavo), chapter I. (Grampus).—Though this fish, whose loud sonorous
breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known
a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But possessing
all the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised
him for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet
in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in herds;
he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in quantity, and pretty
good for light. By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory of the
advance of the great sperm whale.
Book II. (Octavo), chapter II. (Black Fish).—I give the popular fishermen’s names
for all these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name happens to be
vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another. I do so now touching the
Black Fish, so called because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So,
call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known and from the
circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he carries an
everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale averages some sixteen
or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost all latitudes. He has a peculiar
way of showing his dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which looks something like
a Roman nose. When not more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters
sometimes capture the Hyena whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic
employment— as some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite
alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their
blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of thirty gallons
of oil.
Book II. (Octavo), chapter III. (Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale.— Another
instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar horn
being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in
length, while its horn averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain
to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out
from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found on
the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to
the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or

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lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of
the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs
it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it
was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea,
and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. But you
cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however
this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale—however that may be—it
would certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets. The
Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn
whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism to be found in almost
every kingdom of animated nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have
gathered that this same sea-unicorn’s horn was in ancient days regarded as the
great antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense
prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies the same way that
the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in
itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin
Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave
her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship
sailed down the Thames; “when Sir Martin returned from that voyage,” saith Black
Letter, “on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the
Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.” An Irish
author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise present to her
highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.
The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a milk-white
ground color, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior,
clear and fine; but there is little of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found
in the circumpolar seas.
Book II. (Octavo), chapter IV. (Killer).—Of this whale little is precisely known to
the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed naturalists. From what I have
seen of him at a distance, I should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus.
He is very savage—a sort of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales
by the lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death.
The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception might
be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctness.
For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
Book II. (Octavo), chapter V. (Thrasher).—This gentleman is famous for his tail
which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts the Folio whale’s back,
and as he swims, he works his passage by flogging him; as some schoolmasters get
along in the world by a similar process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of
the Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.
Thus ends book II. (Octavo), and begins book III, (Duodecimo.)
Duodecimoes.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise. II. The
Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may possibly seem
strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five feet should be marshalled
among whales—a word, which, in the popular sense, always conveys an idea of
hugeness. But the creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales,
by the terms of my definition of what a whale is—i.e. a spouting fish, with a
horizontal tail.

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Book III. (Duodecimo), chapter 1. (Huzza Porpoise).—This is the common porpoise

found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal; for there are
more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them. I
call him thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad
sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their
appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine spirits,
they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They are the lads that
always live before the wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can
withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the
spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will
yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid extracted from
his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among jewellers and watchmakers.
Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It may never
have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is
not very readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and
you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.
Book III. (Duodecimo), chapter II. (Algerine Porpoise).—A pirate. Very savage.
He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger than the Huzza
Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to a
shark. I have lowered for him many times, but never yet saw him captured.
Book III. (Duodecimo), chapter III. (Mealy-mouthed Porpoise).—The largest kind
of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is known. The only English
name, by which he has hitherto been designated, is that of the fisher—Right-Whale
Porpoise, from the circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio.
In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund
and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure. He has no
fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental
Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back
down to his side fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a
ship’s hull, called the “bright waist,” that line streaks him from stem to stern, with
two separate colors, black above and white below. The white comprises part of his
head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just escaped
from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is much
like that of the common porpoise.
Beyond the Duodecimo, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise
is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there
are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American
whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by
their fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to future
investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of the following
whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated
into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:— The
Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale;
the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the
Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; & c. From
Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of
uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as
altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of
Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.

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

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Chapter XXXIII
The Specksynder

Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set
down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the
harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the
whale-fleet.
The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by the fact,
that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command
of a whale-ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but
was divided between him and an officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word
means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer.
In those days, the captain’s authority was restricted to the navigation and general
management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting department and all its
concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British
Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official
is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks
simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain’s more inferior
subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success of
a whaling voyage largely depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only
an important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches
on a whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the
grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from
the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional
superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal.
Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this—the first
lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates
have their quarters with the captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers
the harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take
their meals in the captain’s cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating
with it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of all
voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community
of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or low, depend for their
profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck, together with their
common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some
cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet,
never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in
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some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at
least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done
away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper
parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any military
navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial
purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to
that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever exacted,
was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man to remove the
shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were
times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to
be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in
terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the
paramount forms and usages of the sea.
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and
usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them
for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve.
That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained
unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an
irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can
never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid
of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or
less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire
from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to
those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice
hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over
the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when
extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to
idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas
the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then,
the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will
the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep
and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one
now alluded to.
But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and
shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal
that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all
outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be
grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep,
and featured in the unbodied air!

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Chapter XXXIV
The Cabin-Table

It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from
the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master who, sitting in the lee
quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of the sun; and is now mutely
reckoning the latitude on the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that
daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention
to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But
presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck, and in
an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,” disappears into the
cabin.
When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck, the first
Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from
his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the
binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends
the scuttle. The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly
shaking the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that important rope,
he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid “Dinner, Mr. Flask,” follows
after his predecessors.
But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to
feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks in
all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless
squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a dexterous
sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so
far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other processions, by
bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he
pauses, ships a new face altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask
enters King Ahab’s presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of
sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation,
bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten
to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner
in that same commander’s cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table; this
is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem?
Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar,
not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of
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mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides
over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man’s unchallenged power
and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man’s royalty of state
transcends Belshazzar’s, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once
dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It is a witchery of social
czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you super-add
the official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause
of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the
white coral beach, surrounded by his war-like but still deferential cubs. In his own
proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were as little children before
Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance.
With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man’s knife, as he carved
the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they would have
profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even upon so neutral a topic
as the weather. No! And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the
slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck’s plate towards him, the
mate received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little
started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly;
and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at
Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial
Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence;
and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb.
What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold
below. And poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary
family party. His were the shin-bones of the saline beef; his would have been the
drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this must have seemed
to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that
table, doubtless, never more would he have been able to hold his head up in this
honest world; nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask
helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of
all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of
the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or
whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters, butter was
at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask,
alas! was a butterless man!
Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is the
first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in point of time.
Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege
of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens
to have but a small appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast,
then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day;
for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was
that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of
an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than
hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep
it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed
from my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned
beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There’s the fruits of

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Moby-Dick 116

promotion now; there’s the vanity of glory: there’s the insanity of life! Besides, if it
were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask’s
official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to
go aft at dinnertime, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting
silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.
Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in the
Pequod’s cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival,
the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the
pallid steward. And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being
its residuary legatees. They made a sort of temporary servants’ hall of the high and
mighty cabin.
In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible
domineerings of the captain’s table, was the entire care-free license and ease, the
almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their
masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws,
the harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to
it. They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading
with spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out
the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to
bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And
if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump,
then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at
his back, harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted
Dough-Boy’s memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a
great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the
circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous, shuddering
sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a
hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and
the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy’s whole life
was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished
with all things they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little
pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till
all was over.
It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing his filed
teeth to the Indian’s; crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench
would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; at every motion of
his colossal limbs, making the low cabin framework to shake, as when an African
elephant goes passenger in a ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully
abstemious, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively
small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad, baronial,
and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep
of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the
sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished.
But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating— an ugly sound
enough—so much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether
any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear Tashtego
singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be picked, the simple-
witted Steward all but shattered the crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by
his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried

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in their pockets, for their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones,
at dinner, they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did
not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his
Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous,
convivial indiscretion. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white waiter who waits
upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good
time, though, to his great delight, the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart;
to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at
every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived there; still,
being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were scarcely ever in it except at
mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own
peculiar quarters.
In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains,
who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship’s cabin belongs to
them; and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted
there. So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more
properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter
it, it was something as a streetdoor enters a house; turning inwards for a moment,
only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing, residing in the open air.
Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab
was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was
still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in
settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan
of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there,
sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in
the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!

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Chapter XXXV
The Mast-Head

It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen
my first mast-head came round.
In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously
with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles,
and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four,
or five years’ voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an
empty vial even— then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last! and not till
her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether relinquish
the hope of capturing one whale more.
Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very ancient
and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take it, that the earliest
standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I
find none prior to them. For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must
doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia,
or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of
theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God’s wrath;
therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And
that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based
upon the general belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded
for astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stairlike
formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings
of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for
new stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just
bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who
built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his
life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a
remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven
from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything
out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have
but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of
facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out
upon discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the
column of Vendome stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in
the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below, whether Louis Philippe, Louis
Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering
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main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ pillars, his column marks that
point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral Nelson, also,
on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and even
when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is
there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor
Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked
to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it
may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future,
and descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned.
It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers of
the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an
item for which Obed Macy, the sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The
worthy Obed tells us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were
regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty
spars along the seacoast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats,
something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few years ago this same plan
was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying the game,
gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now
become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at
sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen
taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two
hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head:
nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet
above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts,
while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters
of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at
old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing
ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds
blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling
life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes;
extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary
excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks;
are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner— for all your
meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is
immutable.
In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years’ voyage, as
often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would
amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to
which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life,
should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or
adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a
hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and
snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual
point of perch is the head of the t’ gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin
parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’ gallant crosstrees. Here,
tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a
bull’s horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you,
in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no
more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy

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tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without
running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps
in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or
additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your
body, and no more can you make a convenience closet of your watch-coat.
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern
whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow’s-
nests, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement
weather of the frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A
Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for
the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” in this admirable
volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial
account of the then recently invented crow’s-nest of the Glacier, which was the
name of Captain Sleet’s good craft. He called it the Sleet’s crow’s-nest, in honor of
himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous
false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own names
(we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we
denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet’s
crow’s-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where
it is furnished with a movable sidescreen to keep to windward of your head in a
hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little
trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship, is a
comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In
front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and
other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in
this crow’s-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed
in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off
the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot
successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to
shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love
for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his
crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats
us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small
compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from
what is called the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to
the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s case,
perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew;
I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his
learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass observations,” and “approximate
errors,” he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in
those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards
that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow’s
nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and
even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him
that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and
comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was
studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches
of the pole.
But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet

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and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by

the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers
mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the
top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there;
then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard,
take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate
destination.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry
guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left
completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly
hold my obligations to observe all whaleships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather
eye open, and sing out every time.”
And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket!
Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow
eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon
instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be
seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you
ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor
are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an
asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted
with the corking care of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe
Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless
disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philoso-
phers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage;
half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in
their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in
vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their
opera-glasses at home.
“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising
now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are
scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps
there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an
opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth
by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless
soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful
thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible
form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the
soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs
away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s
sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe
over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling
ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your

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hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you
hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek
you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.
Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

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Chapter XXXVI
The Quarter-Deck

(Enter Ahab: Then, all)

It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly
after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck.
There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the
same meal, take a few turns in the garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds,
upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like geological
stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that
ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints—the
foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous
step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at
every uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle,
you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as
he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward
mould of every outer movement.
“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks the
shell. ‘Twill soon be out.”
The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck,
with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and
inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a
shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.
“Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on ship-board
except in some extraordinary case.
“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come down!”
When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly
unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon
when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and
then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though
not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head
and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering
among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have
summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this did
not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:—
Moby-Dick 124

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

“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty
animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
“And what do ye next, men?”
“Lower away, and after him!”
“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance
of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each
other, as if marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such
seemingly purposeless questions.
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his pivot-hole,
with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping
it, addressed them thus:—
“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale.
Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to
the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon
top-maul.”
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly
rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and
without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a
sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming
of the wheels of his vitality in him.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with
the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a
high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with
a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed
whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye
raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the
act of nailing the gold to the mast.
“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul: “a
white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but
a bubble, sing out.”
All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more
intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow
and crooked jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific
recollection.
“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some
call Moby Dick.”
“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”
“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the Gay-Header
deliberately.
“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a parmacetty,
and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
“And he have one, two, tree—oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,” cried
Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him—him-” faltering hard for a

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word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle—“like
him—him-”
“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and
wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat,
and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing;
aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it
is Moby Dick ye have seen— Moby Dick—Moby Dick!”
“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been
eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a
thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. “Captain Ahab, I have heard of
Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?”
“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties
all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this
dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob,
like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale
that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing
both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase
him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and
round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for,
men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till
he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it,
now? I think ye do look brave.”
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited
old man: “A sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”
“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men. Steward!
go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck;
wilt thou not chase the white whale! art not game for Moby Dick?”
“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it
fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales,
not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee
even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket
market.”
“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower
layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their
great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts
of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium
here!”
“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it rings most
vast, but hollow.”
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from
blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems
blasphemous.”
“Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as
pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there,
some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from
behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can
the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white
whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.
But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with

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Moby-Dick 126

an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate;
and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that
hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted
me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort
of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man,
is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye!
more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest
and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is
said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are
small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish
cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan
leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give
no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one
and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder
Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one
tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ‘Tis but to help strike
a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt,
then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every
foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone. Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the
billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee.
(Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs.
Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.”
“God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.
But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not hear
his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging
vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against
the masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast
eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away;
the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah,
ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye
predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without,
as verifications of the fore-going things within. For with little external to constrain
us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.
“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered them
to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan, with
their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood at his side with their
lances, and the rest of the ship’s company formed a circle round the group; he stood
for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met
his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere
he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the
hidden snare of the Indian.
“Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest
seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts—long
swallows, men; ’tis hot as Satan’s hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes
in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it
went, this way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
“Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates,

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flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and
ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my
fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back?
bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming
again, wert not thou St. Vitus’ imp—away, thou ague!
“Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch
the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating
lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched
them; meanwhile glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It
seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked
into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own
magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic
aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell
downright.
“In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ’tis well. For did ye three but once take the
full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out
me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down
lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan
kinsmen there— yon three most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant
harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of
beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension,
that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the
poles, ye harpooneers!”
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached
iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him.
“Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not the
goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance. The irons!
take them; hold them while I fill!” Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the
other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them,
ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the
deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers!
drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow— Death to Moby
Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed
steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the
spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned,
and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds
among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all dispersed; and
Ahab retired within his cabin.

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Chapter XXXVII
Sunset

The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The
envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The
gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun— slow dived from noon—goes down; my
soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy
that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the
wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly
confounds. ‘Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ‘Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged
edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull,
mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me,
so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is
anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the
low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the
midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the
window.)
‘Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my
one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will,
like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh,
hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared,
I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad— Starbuck does; but
I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to
comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I
lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be
the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I
laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded
Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of your own
size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye
have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long
gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve
me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there.
Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul
is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains,
under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to
Moby-Dick 129

the iron way!

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Chapter XXXVIII
Dusk

By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.

My soul is more than matched; she’s over-manned; and by a madman! Insuffer-
able sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down,
and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I
must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me
with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye,
he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I
plainly see my miserable office,— to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with
touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it.
Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery
world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting
purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my
whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift
again.
[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.]
Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human
mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is
their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the
unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling
sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after
it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the
wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me
through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis in an hour like this,
with soul beat down and held to knowledge,— as wild, untutored things are forced
to feed—Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but ’tis not me!
that horror’s out of me, and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try
to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed
influences!
Chapter XXXIX
First Night Watch

(Stubb solus, and mending a brace.)

Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it ever since, and
that ha, ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh’s the wisest, easiest
answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always left— that
unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck;
but to my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be
sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift, might
readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it. Well,
Stubb, wise Stubb— that’s my title—well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase.
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such
a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra!
What’s my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes out?— Giving a party
to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate’s pennant, and so am
I—fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh—
We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,
To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.
A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir— (Aside) he’s my
superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken.— Aye, aye, sir, just through with this
job—coming.
Chapter XL
Midnight, Forecastle

Harpooners and Sailors

(Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and lying in
various attitudes, all singing in chorus.)
Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
Our captain’s commanded.—
1st Nantucket sailor
Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental. it’s bad for the digestion!
Take a tonic, follow me! (Sings, and all follow)
Our captain stood upon the deck,
A spy-glass in his hand,
A viewing of those gallant whales
That blew at every strand.
Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
And by your braces stand,
And we’ll have one of those fine whales,
Hand, boys, over hand!
So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!
Mate’S voice from the quarter-deck
Eight bells there, forward!
2nd Nantucket sailor
Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d’ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou
Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I’ve the sort of mouth for that—the
hogshead mouth. So, so, (thrusts his head down the scuttle,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s,
a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below! Tumble up!
Dutch sailor
Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark this in our old Mogul’s
wine; it’s quite as deadening to some as filliping to others. We sing; they sleep—aye,
lie down there, like ground-tier butts. At ’em again! There, take this copper-pump,
and hail ’em through it. Tell ’em to avast dreaming of their lassies. Tell ’em it’s
the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment. That’s the
way—that’s it; thy throat ain’t spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter.
French sailor
Moby-Dick 133

Hist, boys! let’s have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in Blanket Bay. What
say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with
your tambourine!
Pip (Sulky and sleepy)
Don’t know where it is.
French sailor
Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry’s the word;
hurrah! Damn me, won’t you dance? Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the
double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs! legs!
Iceland sailor
I don’t like your floor, maty; it’s too springy to my taste. I’m used to ice-floors. I’m
sorry to throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me.
Maltese sailor
Me too; where’s your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right,
and say to himself, how d’ye do? Partners! I must have partners!
Sicilian sailor
Aye; girls and a green!—then I’ll hop with ye; yea, turn grasshopper!
LONG-ISLAND sailor
Well, well, ye sulkies, there’s plenty more of us. Hoe corn when you may, say I.
All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the music; now for it!
Azore sailor (Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle.)
Here you are, Pip; and there’s the windlass-bits; up you mount! Now, boys!
(The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some sleep or lie
among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.)
Azore sailor (Dancing)
Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies;
break the jinglers!
Pip
Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.
CHINA sailor
Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.
French sailor
Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!
Split jibs! tear yourselves! Tashtego ( Quietly smoking.)
That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat.
Old Manx sailor
I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over.
I’ll dance over your grave, I will—that’s the bitterest threat of your night-women,
that beat head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and
the green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars
have it; and so ’tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you’re young; I
was once.
3rd Nantucket sailor
Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm— give us a
whiff, Tash.
(They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky darkens— the
wind rises.)
LASCAR sailor

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Moby-Dick 134

By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide Ganges turned
to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
Maltese sailor (Reclining and shaking his cap)
It’s the waves—the snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon.
Now would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with them
evermore! There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!— as those
swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide
such ripe, bursting grapes.
Sicilian sailor (Reclining)
Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet interlacings of the limbs— lithe sway-
ings—coyings—flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not
taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (Nudging.)
Tahitian sailor (Reclining on a mat)
Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled,
high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee
woven in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn
and wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be
transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee’s peak of spears,
when they leap down the crags and drown the villages?—The blast, the blast! Up,
spine, and meet it! (Leaps to his feet.)
Portuguese sailor
How the sea rolls swashing ‘gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the
winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they’ll go lunging presently.
Danish sailor
Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well done! The
mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat,
put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
4th Nantucket sailor
He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a
squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol— fire your ship right
into it!
English sailor
Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his
whale!
All
Aye! aye!
Old Manx sailor
How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when
shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed clay. Steady,
helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and
keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s
another in the sky lurid—like, ye see, all else pitch black.
Daggoo
What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me!
I’m quarried out of it!
Spanish sailor
(Aside.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes me touchy (Advancing.)
Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark at
that. No offence.

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Moby-Dick 135

Daggoo (Grimly)
None.
St. Jago’s sailor
That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or else in his one case our old
Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat long in working.
5th Nantucket sailor
What’s that I saw—lightning? Yes.
Spanish sailor
No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
Daggoo (Springing)
Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
Spanish sailor (Meeting him)
Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!
All
A row! a row! a row!
Tashtego (With a whiff)
A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both brawlers! Humph!
Belfast sailor
A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row!
Plunge in with ye!
English sailor
Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife!
A ring, a ring!
Old Manx sailor
Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet
work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st thou the ring?
Mate’s voice from the quarter-deck
Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
All
The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (They scatter.)
Pip (Shrinking under the windlass)
Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-
whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being
in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts
now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re
on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps
there are worse yet— they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale,
shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale—shirr!
shirr!—but spoken of once! and only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like
my tambourine— that anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh! thou
big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small
black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!

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Chapter XLI
Moby Dick

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had
been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch
my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling
was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the
history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our
oaths of violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded
White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm
Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a few of them,
comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had actually
and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number
of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery
circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary
latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch,
to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each
separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with
other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the
whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning
Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have
encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale
of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to
his assailants, has completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair
presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby
Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not
unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked;
therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick;
such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror
he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to
the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab
and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught
sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as
boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But
at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults— not restricted to sprained
wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last
Moby-Dick 137

degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling
their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of
many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the
true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors naturally
grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives
birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild
rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as
the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other
sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which
sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from
that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they
are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly
astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand
to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a
thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled
hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes
and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by
influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth. No
wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the wildest
watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate
with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions
of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors
unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic
did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White
Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Nor
even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully
distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of
the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though
intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale,
would perhaps—either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity,
decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen,
especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who
have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of
the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;
seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest
and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the preeminent
tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended,
than on board of those prows which stem him.
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary times
thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists— Olassen and Povel-
son—declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a consternation to every other
creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst
for human blood. Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost
similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms
that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are “struck with the
most lively terrors,” and “often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves
against the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death.” And however

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the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their
full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in
them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the
fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale
fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to
embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that
although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lances
at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt
it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some
remarkable documents that may be consulted.
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready
to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of
him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and
without superstitious accompaniments were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the
battle if offered.
One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the
White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit
that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite
latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without
some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents in
the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the
hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part,
unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most
curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the
mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with
such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well
a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales
have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the
barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that
in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between
the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference,
it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor’ West Passage, so long a
problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living
experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello
mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the
wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the
Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from
the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost
fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after
repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much
matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions;
declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but
ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he
would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick
blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined

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billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.
But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the
earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination
with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much
distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a
peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These
were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted
seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same
shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the
White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen
gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy
foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed
lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled,
intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over
again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of
dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers,
with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn
around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters,
or drive them back in consternation to their ship.
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters,
however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most
instances, such seemed the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity, that
every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having
been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more
desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the
sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s
direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth
or a bridal.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies;
one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale,
as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach
the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that
suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped
away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no
hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small
reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab
had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in
his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily
woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam
before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which
some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart
and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to
whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which
the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;— Ahab did not fall
down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred
white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens

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and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that
cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought;
all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in
Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage
and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been
a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise
time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand,
he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he
received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration,
but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for
long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one
hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it
was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing,
made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter,
that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at
intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of
a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover
intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as
he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings
of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild
stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the
old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came
forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that
firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his
mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his
hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline
thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still
subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the
unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably
through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot
of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot
of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became
the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed
his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own
mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now
possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon
any one reasonable object.
This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain
to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from within
the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand—however grand
and wonderful, now quit it;— and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those
vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper
earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique
buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the
great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding
on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder,
sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget
ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret

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come.
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely; all my means are sane,
my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact;
he likewise knew that to mankind he did now long dissemble; in some sort, did still.
But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will
determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when
with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise
than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which
had overtaken him.
The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to
a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to
the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his
brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another
whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that
prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was
all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as
the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed,
unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would
seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling
of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that,
yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his
underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad
secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed
upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the
White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of
what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls
have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable
cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an
audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s
whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel rene-
gades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence
of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of
indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such
a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality
to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly
responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that
at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable
foe as his; how all this came to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to
their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might
have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,— all this to explain, would
be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us
all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound
of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a
seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the
time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught
in that brute but the deadliest ill.

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Chapter XLII
The Whiteness of The Whale

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me,
as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could
not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another
thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its
intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh
ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was
the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else
all these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if
imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and
though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in
this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the
White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and
the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal
standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;
and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the
imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies
to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky
tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of
gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in
other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of
many touching, noble things— the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though
among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the
deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty
of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings
and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of
the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the
holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made
incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter
sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,
that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the
Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from
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the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their
sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the
holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of
the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given
to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the
great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for
all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and
sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue,
which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced
from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to
heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and
the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them
the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such
an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of
their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger
courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.*
With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain
go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded,
which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that
heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the
irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial
innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions
in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even
assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have
that intensified terror.
As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature,
when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the
Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name
they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with “Requiem
eternam” (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any
other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this
shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin.
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonder-
ment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not
Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*
I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in
waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended
to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal,
feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At
intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark.
Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered
cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible,
strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide,
and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of
traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can
only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning,
asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard

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that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to
men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman’s
name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have had
aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird
upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an
albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the noble
merit of the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks
the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms
there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never
with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a
treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain made
a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship’s time
and place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for
man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding,
the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White
Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed,
bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning
carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in
those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their
flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads
on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail,
invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could
have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen,
western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories
of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-bowed and
fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in
the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio;
or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon,
the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through
his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest
Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned
from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual
whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness
had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a
certain nameless terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and
strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye,
as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness
which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well
made as other men— has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-
pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.
Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less
malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the
terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has

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been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of
human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the
desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail
to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that
the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the
marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge
of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that
pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap
them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle
round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors
seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist,
rides on his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he
will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it
calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account
for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some
of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness—though for the time either
wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to it
aught fearful, but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
modified;— can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the
hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without
imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless,
some at least of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been
shared by most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time,
and therefore may not be able to recall them now.
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted
with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal
in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-
cast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant
of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a
White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings
(which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell
so much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those
other storied structures, its neighbors— the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody?
And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in
peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention
of that name, while the thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy,
distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the
name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the
Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on
the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a
wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the
old fairy tales of Central Europe, does “the tall pale man” of the Hartz forests, whose
changeless pallor unrestingly glides through the green of the groves— why is this

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phantom more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes;
nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never
rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and
crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues
of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;— it is not these
things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see.
For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of
her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the
cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid
pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is
not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise
terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances
whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon,
especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or univer-
sality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated
by the following examples.
First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he
hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation
to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be
called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky
whiteness— as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were
swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded
phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead
assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never
rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee,
“Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
whiteness that so stirred me?”
Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snowhowdahed
Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal
frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of
what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the
same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference
views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to
break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the
Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers
of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking
hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning
upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.
But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white
flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont,
far removed from all beasts of prey— why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but
shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells
its wild animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw
the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings
of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he
smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils;

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for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge
of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when
he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to
the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into
dust.
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned
frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all
these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign
gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must
exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the
invisible spheres were formed in fright.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why
it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more porten-
tous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual
things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the
intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensi-
ties of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation,
when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence
whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same
time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb
blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of
atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the
natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely embla-
zoning— the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of
butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits,
not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified
Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the
charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical
cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever
remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter,
would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering
all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the
wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all
the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.
Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? ..

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Chapter XLIII
Hark!

“Hist! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?

It was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon,
extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the
taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing,
for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful
not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest
silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the
unceasingly advancing keel.
It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post was
near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the words above.
“Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”
“There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a cough— it sounded
like a cough.”
“Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.”
“There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over,
now!”
“Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits ye eat for
supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the bucket!”
“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
“Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress’s
knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the chap.”
“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down
in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul
knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there
was something of that sort in the wind.”
“Tish! the bucket!”
Chapter XLIV
The Chart

Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place
on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would
have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled
roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table.
Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various
lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace
additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer
to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in
which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured
or seen.
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head,
continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams
and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he
himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible
pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his
forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab
thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost
every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For with
the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents
and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac
thought of his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might
seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the un-
hooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of
all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s
food; and, also calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in
particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to
certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of
his prey.
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale’s
resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he be closely
observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for one voyage of the
entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would
be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of
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swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory
charts of the sperm whale.1
Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm
whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret intelligence from
the Deity—mostly swim in veins, as they are called; continuing their way along
a given ocean-line with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her
course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these
cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel,
and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight
wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to swim, generally
embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand
or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads,
when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular
seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with great
confidence be looked for.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate feeding-
grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the widest expanses
of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place and time himself on
his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting.
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his delirious but
still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious
sperm whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds, yet in general you
cannot conclude that the herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude
this year, say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found
there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances
where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same remark, only
within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured,
aged sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for
example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano
Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow that were the Pequod to visit
either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly
encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding-grounds, where he had
at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places
and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s
chances of accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has
only been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere
a particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a
certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one technical
phrase—the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive years,
Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile,
as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of
the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white
whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his
vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with
which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit
himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however
flattering it might be to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so

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tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-
on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the
great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees
of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must
wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing
had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion
of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was
before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would
spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation
in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled
brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other
waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans,
Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the
devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a
mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if
encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter,
even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople?
Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump,
could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter
to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would throw
himself back in reveries—tallied him, and shall he escape? His broad fins are bored,
and scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear! And here, his mad mind would run on in
a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him! and
in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what
trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved
revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody
nails in his palms.
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams
of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried
them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round
in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable
anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved
his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked
flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down
among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be
heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state
room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of
being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own
resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab,
the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that
had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it
in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in
sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other
times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from
the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer
an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore
it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to

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his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced
itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its
own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was
conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore,
the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed
from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic
being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a
blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in
thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds
upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
1.
1. Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official
circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington,
April 16th, 1851.
By that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in course of completion;
and portions of it are presented in the circular. “This chart divides the ocean into
districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly
through each of which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and
horizontally through each of which districts are three lines; one to show the number
of days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to
show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.”

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Chapter XLV
The Affidavit

So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly
touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm
whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as important a one as will be
found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and
more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover
to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may
induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair.
I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to
produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or reliably
known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it— the conclusion
aimed at will naturally follow of itself.
First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving
a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one instance
of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two
irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken from the body. In
the instance where three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons;
and I think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted them
happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went
ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he
travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages,
tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering
in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also
have been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing
with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this whale
again came together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I, myself, have known
three instances similar to this; that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and,
upon the second attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them,
afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out that I
was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time distinctly recognized a
peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale’s eye, which I had observed there three
years previous. I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here
are three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of
many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no good
ground to impeach.
Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant the
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world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable historical
instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at distant times and places
popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether
and originally owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales;
for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end
to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable
oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of the fishery there
hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a whale as there did about
Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were content to recognise him by
merely touching their tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them
on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some
poor devils ashore that happen to known an irascible great man, they make distant
unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance
further, they might receive a summary thump for their presumption.
But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity—nay,
you may call it an oceanwide renown; not only was he famous in life and now is
immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights,
privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or
Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg,
who so long did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft
seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou
terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land?
Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed
the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel!
thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the
back! In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean
History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.
But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various times
creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were finally gone in quest
of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed by valiant whaling captains, who
heaved up their anchors with that express object as much in view, as in setting
out through the Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to
capture that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the
Indian King Philip.
I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of
one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form establishing
in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more
especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where
truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of
some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some
hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might
scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a
hideous and intolerable allegory.
First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general perils of
the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid conception of those perils,
and the frequency with which they recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in
fifty of the actual disasters and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a
public record at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record.
Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by

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the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of
the sea by the sounding leviathan— do you suppose that that poor fellow’s name
will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast?
No: because the mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact,
did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect from New
Guinea? Yet I will tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the
Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had
had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost
a boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a
gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.
Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an
enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when narrating to
them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness, they have significantly
complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no
more idea of being facetious than Moses, when he wrote the history of the plagues
of Egypt.
But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon testimony
entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some
cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct
aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more,
the Sperm Whale has done it.
First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was
cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave
chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of the whales were wounded;
when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal,
and bore directly down upon the ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he
so stove her in, that in less than “ten minutes” she settled down and fell over. Not
a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of
the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain
Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the gods
shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the second time his
ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never attempted
it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen
Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his
plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few
miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*
The following are extracts from Chace’s narrative: “Every fact seemed to warrant
me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his operations; he
made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval between them, both of
this catastrophe I have never chanced to their direction, were calculated to do us
the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.
Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J—then commanding
an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party
of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich
Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be scep-
tical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen
present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so smite his
stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but
there is more coming. Some weeks later, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable

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craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that
begged a few moments’ confidential business with him. That business consisted in
fetching the Commodore’s craft such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he
made straight for the nearest port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious,
but I consider the Commodore’s interview with that whale as providential. Was not
Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm
whale will stand no nonsense.
I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s Voyages for a little circumstance in point, pe-
culiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was
attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern’s famous Discovery Expedition in the
beginning of the present century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth
chapter:
“By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were
out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine,
but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For some
days we had very little wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the
northwest sprang up. An uncommonly large whale, the body of which was larger
than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by
any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost
upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him. We were
thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its
back, raised the ship three feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and
the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the
deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the
monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D’Wolf applied
immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel had received any
damage from the shock, but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely
uninjured.”
Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in question,
is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures as a sea-captain,
this day resides in the village of Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of being
a nephew of his. I have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in
Langsdorff. He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a
large one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle
after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too, of honest
wonders—the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier’s old chums—I found a
little matter set down so like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear
inserting it here for a corroborative example, if such be needed.
Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Ferdinando,” as he calls the modern
Juan Fernandes. “In our way thither,” he says, “about four o’clock in the morning,
when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our
ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could
hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for
death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted
the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over, we
cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. ... The suddenness of the shock
made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of
their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of

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his cabin!” Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to
substantiate the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about
that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But I should not
much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was
after all caused by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.
I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of
the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more than one instance,
he has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats back to their ships, but to
pursue the ship itself, and long withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks.
The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength,
let me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a running
sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and secured there! the
whale towing her great hull through the water, as a horse walks off with a cart.
Again, it is very often observed that, if the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed
time to rally, he then acts, not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate
designs of destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent
indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his
mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But
I must be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable
and most significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most
marvellous event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but
that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for the
millionth time we say amen with Solomon—Verily there is nothing new under the
sun.
In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate of Con-
stantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As
many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon
value. By the best authorities, he has always been considered a most trustworthy
and unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all
affecting the matter presently to be mentioned.
Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of his
prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring
Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those
waters for a period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial
history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what
precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships,
as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined
to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long time I fancied that
the sperm whale had been always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep
waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain that those seas are not, and
perhaps never can be, in the present constitution of things, a place for his habitual
gregarious resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in
modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale
in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a
Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as
a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could,
by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance called brit
is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have every reason to believe

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Moby-Dick 158

that the food of the sperm whale— squid or cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that
sea, because large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been
found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and reason
upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning,
Procopius’s sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Roman Emperor,
must in all probability have been a sperm whale.

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Chapter XLVI
Surmises

Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and ac-
tions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to
sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that
he was by nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways,
altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if this
were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more influential with
him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to
hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended
itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by
so much the more he multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered
whale would prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be
indeed exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though not
so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means
incapable of swaying him.
To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow
of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however
magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency
did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority
involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but
stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will
were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain; still he knew
that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain’s quest, and could
he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It might be
that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that
long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion
against his captain’s leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial
influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity
of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in
his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt
should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which
naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn
into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted
meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches,
his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick. For
however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement
Moby-Dick 160

of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable—
they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness— and when
retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life
and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests
and employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the final
dash.
Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion mankind
disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent
constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness.
Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and
playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in
them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have
food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric
Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to
fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and
gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one
final and romantic object— that final and romantic object, too many would have
turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of
cash—aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no
perspective promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once
mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.
Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related to Ahab
personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely
revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod’s voyage, Ahab was now
entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the
unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and
legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further
obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From even the
barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a
suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious
to protect himself. That protection could only consist in his own predominating
brain and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every
minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected to.
For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally devel-
oped here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree continue true to the
natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s voyage; observe all customary usages; and
not only that, but force himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in
the general pursuit of his profession.
Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three mastheads
and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a
porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.

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Chapter XLVII
The Mat-Maker

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks,
or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly
employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat.
So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an
incantation of revelry lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into
his own invisible self.
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept
passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the
warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways,
ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking
off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn; I say so
strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea,
only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this
were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and
weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but
one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough
to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp
seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle
and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s
impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or
strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding
blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric;
this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp
and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance— aye, chance, free will,
and necessity—no wise incompatible— all interweavingly working together. The
straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course— its every
alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her
shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the
right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring
blow at events.
Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange,
long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped
from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a
wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body
Moby-Dick 162

was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief
sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very
moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-
outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed
old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering
towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding
the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.
“There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”
“Where-away?”
“On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”
Instantly all was commotion.
The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable
uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his
genus.
“There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.
“Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”
Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute
to Ahab.
The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before
it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we
confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that
singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head
in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills around,
and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could not
now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego
had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men
selected for shipkeepers—that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time
relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had
come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the
mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire
baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand
clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the
long line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on board an enemy’s ship.
But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye
from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five
dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.

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Chapter XLVIII
The First Lowering

The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck,
and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat
which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats,
though technically called the captain’s, on account of its hanging from the starboard
quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white
tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black
cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff.
But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the
living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect,
the companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar
to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;—a race notorious for a certain
diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid
spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose
counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.
While yet the wondering ship’s company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab
cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, “All ready there, Fedallah?”
“Ready,” was the half-hissed reply.
“Lower away then; d’ye hear?” shouting across the deck.
“Lower away there, I say.”
Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men sprang
over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats
dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any
other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship’s side into the
tossed boats below.
Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth keel, coming
from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed the five strangers
rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and
Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with
all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of
the other boats obeyed not the command.
“Captain Ahab?-” said Starbuck.
“Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab; “give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out
more to leeward!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great steering
oar. “Lay back!” addressing his crew. “There!—there!— there again! There she
Moby-Dick 164

blows right ahead, boys!—lay back!

“Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.”
“Oh, I don’t mind’em, sir,” said Archy; “I knew it all before now. Didn’t I hear
’em in the hold? And didn’t I tell Cabaco here of it? What say ye, Cabaco? They are
stowaways, Mr. Flask.”
“Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones,” drawl-
ingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of
uneasiness. “Why don’t you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare
at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands come to help
us never mind from where the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind
the brimstone devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that’s the
stroke for a thousand pounds; that’s the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the
gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men—all hearts alive! Easy, easy;
don’t be in a hurry— don’t be in a hurry. Why don’t you snap your oars, you rascals?
Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so, then:—softly, softly! That’s it—that’s it! long
and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions;
ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can’t ye?
pull, won’t ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don’t ye pull?—pull
and break something! pull, and start your eyes out! Here,” whipping out the sharp
knife from his girdle; “every mother’s son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the
blade between his teeth. That’s it—that’s it. Now ye do something; that looks like it,
my steel-bits. Start her— start her, my silverspoons! Start her, marling-spikes!”
Stubb’s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had rather a
peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in inculcating the religion
of rowing. But you must not suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings that
he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation. Not at all; and therein
consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a
tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated
merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations
without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Besides
he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his
steering-oar, and so broadly gaped— open-mouthed at times—that the mere sight
of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon
the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity
is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the
matter of obeying them.
In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across
Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each
other, Stubb hailed the mate.
“Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye please!”
“Halloa!” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke; still
earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set like a flint from Stubb’s.
“What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!
“Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong, boys!)” in
a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: “A sad business, Mr. Stubb!
(seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all
your crew pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads
of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm,
sperm’s the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand.”

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Moby-Dick 165

“Aye, aye, I thought as much,” soliloquized Stubb, when the boats diverged, “as
soon as I clapt eye on ’em, I thought so. Aye, and that’s what he went into the after
hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long suspected. They were hidden down there. The
White Whale’s at the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right!
Give way men! It ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!”
Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant as the
lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort
of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s company; but Archy’s fancied
discovery having some time previous got abroad among them, though indeed not
credited then, this had in some small measure prepared them for the event. It
took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb’s
confident way of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all manner of
wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s precise agency in the matter from the beginning.
For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the
Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the
unaccountable Elijah.
Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to
windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking
how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed
all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular
strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a
horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed
his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut
against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end
of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer’s, thrown half backward into the air,
as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his
steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him.
All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed,
while the boat’s five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat
motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the rear paused on their
way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no
distantly discernible token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab
had observed it.
“Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou, Queequeg, stand
up!”
Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood
erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the
chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it
was also triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen
coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft,
and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.
Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still; its commander
recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of post rooted in the
keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern platform. It is used for
catching turns with the whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a
man’s hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the
mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little King-Post

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Moby-Dick 166

was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was full of a large and
tall ambition, so that this logger head stand-point of his did by no means satisfy
King-Post.
“I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me onto that.”
Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, swiftly
slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders for a pedestal.
“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”
“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet
taller.”
Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the
gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask’s foot, and then
putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he
himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry
on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm
furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.
At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous habitude
of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even
when pitched about by the most riotously perverse and cross-running seas. Still
more strange to see him giddily perched upon the logger head itself, under such
circumstances. But the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet
more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,
barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his
fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer
looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little
Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he
thereby give to the negro’s lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping
the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons
for that.
Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes. The
whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from
mere fright; and if that were the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was
resolved to solace the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his
hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed
home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match across
the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had
been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his
erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, “Down, down all,
and give way!—there they are!”
To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been visible at
that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin scattered
puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the
confused scud from white rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and
tingled, as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also,
the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of
vapor they spouted, seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.
All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and
air. But it bade far to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass of interblending
bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills.

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Moby-Dick 167

“Pull, pull, my good boys,” said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but intensest
concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes darted
straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two unerring
binnacle compasses. He did not say much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say
anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by
one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.
How different the loud little King-Post. “Sing out and say something, my hearties.
Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys;
only do that for me, and I’ll sign over to you my Martha’s Vineyard plantation, boys;
including wife and children, boys. Lay me on—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall
go stark, staring mad! See! see that white water!” And so shouting, he pulled his
hat from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far
off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat’s stern like a
crazed colt from the prairie.
“Look at that chap now,” philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted
short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed
after—“He’s got fits, that Flask has. Fits? yes, give him fits—that’s the very
word—pitch fits into ’em. Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you
know;— merry’s the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all. But what the
devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and
keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your knives in
two—that’s all. Take it easy—why don’t ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your
livers and lungs!”
But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his—these
were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical
land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words,
when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped
after his prey.
Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask to
“that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which he declared to be incessantly
tantalizing his boat’s bow with its tail—these allusions of his were at times so vivid
and life-like, that they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful
look over his shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put out
their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usages announcing that they
must have no organs but ears; and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments.
It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent
sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales,
like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the
boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that
almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery
glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite
hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of
the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the
wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched
sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling. Not the raw
recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle;
not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other
world;— neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man
does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of

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Moby-Dick 168

the hunted sperm whale.

The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more
visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung upon the
sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to right and left; the
whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck
giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and,
with the still rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness
through the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to
escape being torn from the row-locks.
Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship nor
boat to be seen.
“Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his
sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes. There’s white water
again!—close to! Spring!”
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the
other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-
like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!” and Queequeg, harpoon in hand,
sprang to his feet.
Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close to
them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern
of the boat, they knew that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an
enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile
the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around
us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
“That’s his hump. There, there, give it to him!” whispered Starbuck.
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg.
Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while
forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush
of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake
beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter
into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled
back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering every
rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a
coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean.
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the
whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the
prairie, in which unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death!
In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of
a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud,
rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be
seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless
as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing
of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the
lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the
standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile
candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and

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Moby-Dick 169

symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted
up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the sea, the empty
lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet,
hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards
hitherto muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists
were dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as
the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of
not much more than its length.
Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it tossed
and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a cataract; and then
the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern.
Again we swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up
and safely landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut
loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us
up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,—
an oar or a lance pole.

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Chapter XLIX
The Hyena

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call
life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit
thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s
expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while
disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all
hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent
digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and
worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death
itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed
by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am
speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in
the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to
him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is
nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado
philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the
great White Whale its object.
“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and
I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; “Queequeg, my fine
friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked
through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.
“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket,
was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you
say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the
most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with
your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.”
“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by; “you
are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an
unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back
pulling himself back-foremost into death’s jaws?”
“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I should like to
see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale
would give them squint for squint, mind that!”
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the
entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and
Moby-Dick 171

consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind
of life; considering that at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I
must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat— oftentimes a fellow
who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the
craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our
own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale
almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding,
was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to
this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in what a devil’s
chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say,
I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,”
said I, “come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills
and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.
This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing. After
the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone
was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as
good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean
gain of so many months or weeks as the case may be. I survived myself; my death
and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly,
like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family
vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes
for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.

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Chapter L
Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah

“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg you would not
catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he’s
a wonderful old man!”
“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If his leg were
off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has
one knee, and good part of the other left, you know.”
“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the
paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling
captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s
soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his
ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with
two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the
pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every
individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it
wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the
joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his
entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for
the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet for
Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in
the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that
same boat’s crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s crew from them,
nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken
private measures of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco’s published
discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a
little while out of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting
the whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then found
bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his own hands for what
was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small
wooden skewers, which when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in
the bow: when all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having
an extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand
Moby-Dick 173

the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly
shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the horizontal
piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the
whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary
knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s
chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these things, I
say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody
supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a
view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention
to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means
involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away;
for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds
and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the
earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick
up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits
of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with
the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon
found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them,
yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he
came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced
himself to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort
of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority
over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning
Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate
zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and
then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles
to the east of the continent— those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries,
which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness
of earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct
recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each
other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created
and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted
with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Robbins, indulged
in mundane amours.

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Chapter LI
The Spirit-Spout

Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across
four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the
Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground,
an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight
night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing
seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night
a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the
moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from
the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his
wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same
precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night,
not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think
with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at
such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when,
after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without
uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard
announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as
if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There
she blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more;
yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted
hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every
soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.
Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t’gallant
sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must
take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down
before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze
filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like
air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences
were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly
to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would
have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live
leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a
coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly
sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery
Moby-Dick 175

jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second
time.
This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after,
lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all;
but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never
been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at
it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be;
disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming
at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van, this
solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.
Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the
preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were
there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried;
at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that
unnearable spout was cast by one selfsame whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For
a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if
it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn
round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.
These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous
potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its
blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days
we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in
repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like
prow.
But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around
us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-
tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness,
till, like showers of silver chips, the foamflakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this
desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us;
while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched
on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long
time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting,
uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place
for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the
black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in
anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.
Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called of yore;
for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found
ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into
those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any
haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white,
and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us
on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.
During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time
the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the
gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous
times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more
can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew

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Moby-Dick 176

become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole,
and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand
gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but
congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward
part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a
line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping
waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in
which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent
ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the
swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of
humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in
the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature
seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never
could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one night going down into the
cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight
in his floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he
had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and
coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents
which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly clenched
hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed
eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that swung from a beam in the
ceiling.*
The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the compass
at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the course of the ship.
Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still
thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.

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Chapter LII
The Albatross

South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground
for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she
slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of
that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries— a whaler at sea, and
long absent from home.
As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of
a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with
long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like the
thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A
wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They
seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had
survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast,
they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly
glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that
we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other;
yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one
word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.
“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of
putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and
the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it.
Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between us. While in various
silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous
incident at the first mere mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab
for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to
board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage
of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her aspect
that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly
hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to
address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not
at home, tell them to address them to-”
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in
accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for some
days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed
shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger’s flanks.
Moby-Dick 178

Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have
noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously
carry meanings.
“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There
seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness
than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman,
who thus far had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish her headway, he
cried out in his old lion voice,—“Up helm! Keep her off round the world!”
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but
whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to
the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all
the time before us.
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach
new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or
Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of
those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that,
some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this
round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.

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Chapter LIII
The Gam

The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had spoken
was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not been the
case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded her—judging by his subsequent
conduct on similar occasions—if so it had been that, by the process of hailing, he
had obtained a negative answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned
out, he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except
he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. But all this
might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said here of the peculiar
usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially
on a common cruising-ground.
If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally
desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering each other in such
inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual
salutation; and stopping for a moment to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting
down for a while and resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon
the illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels
descrying each other at the ends of the earth—off lone Fanning’s Island, or the far
away King’s Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such circumstances
these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly
and sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of course, in
the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains, officers, and not a few
of the men are personally known to each other; and consequently, have all sorts of
dear domestic things to talk about.
For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on board;
at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a year or two
later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files. And in return for that
courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the latest whaling intelligence from
the cruising-ground to which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance
to her. And in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing
each other’s track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they are equally long
absent from home. For one of them may have received a transfer of letters from
some third, and now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the
people of the ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling news,
and have an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies
of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common
Moby-Dick 180

pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.

Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so
long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English.
Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such meetings do
not very often occur, and when they do occur there. is too apt to be a sort of shyness
between them; for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does
not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American whalers;
regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort
of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the English whaleman does really
consist, it would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill
more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless
little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take
much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few foibles himself.
So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers have most
reason to be sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some merchant ships crossing
each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a
single word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace
of dandies in Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism
upon each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first
go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns,
that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love
about it at all. As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious
hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when
they chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is—“How many skulls?”—
the same way that whalers hail—“How many barrels?” And that question once
answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both
sides, and don’t like to see overmuch of each other’s villanous likenesses.
But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy
whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of
decent weather? She has a “Gam,” a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships
that they never heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they
only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,”
and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also
all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful
feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. Because,
in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs
has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed;
but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion,
he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in
boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate
has no solid basis to stand on.
But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and
down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word, Dr. Johnson never
attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this
same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some
fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be
incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.
Gam. NOUN—A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a

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

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Chapter LIV
The Town-Ho’s Story

(As told at the Golden Inn)

The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much
like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers
than in any other part.
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound
whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by
Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick.
To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a
circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the
whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of
God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with
its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of
the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his
mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho
himself. It was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship,
one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of
secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much
of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest.
Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the
Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call
it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves
so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’s main-mast. Interweaving in its proper
place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole
of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record.
The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used
by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at
Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon the
thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons,
Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding
questions they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.
“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing
to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your
Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden
Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling
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the pumps according to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in
her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen.
But the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck
awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and
the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not
find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather,
the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide
and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by and not only was the
leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some
alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the
islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance favoured,
he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps
were of the best, and being periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men
of his could easily keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In
truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes,
the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the
occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney,
the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman
and desperado from Buffalo.
“‘Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?’ said Don
Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your courtesy—may
be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs
and three-masted ships, well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out
of your old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our
America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions
popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those
grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and
Michigan,— possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest
traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round
archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part,
are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long
maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted
all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the
goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings
of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose
red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are
flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried
lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts
of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors;
they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago
villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the
State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting
blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,
for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight
ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt
was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner
as any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the

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lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had
long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite
as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the
latitudes of buckhorn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with
some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil
indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of
human recognition which is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt
had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus
far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you
shall hear.
“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for
her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again increasing, but only so
as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day. You must know that in a
settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little
of pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the
officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be
that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all hands
gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to
the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their
pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length! that is, if it
lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded
them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those
waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by several
of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the upper sails to
be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now
this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort
of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking
creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore
when he betrayed this imagine, solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of
the seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in her.
So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head
no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood with their feet
continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain spring,
gentlemen—that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself
out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
“Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world
of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his
fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of
manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and
bitterness; and if he had a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s
tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a
Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy’s
snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had
made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne’s father. But
Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He
did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.

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“Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the
Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings.
“‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye, and
let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I tell ye what, men, old Rad’s
investment must go for it! he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home.
The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a
gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of
’em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements,
I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him to jump overboard and scatter
’em. They’re playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old
soul,—Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in
looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.’
“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney, pretending
not to have heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys, lively, now!’ And
with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it,
and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest
tension of life’s utmost energies.
“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward
all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes
bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now what cozening fiend
it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in that
corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding
along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks,
and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a
pig to run at large.
“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household work
which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has
been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such,
gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness
in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their
faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the
boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho
that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most
athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one
of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business
not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I
mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair
stood between the two men.
“But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as plainly
meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face. Any man
who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand this; and all this and doubtless
much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command.
But as he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate’s
malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the
slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this,
that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in
any already ireful being—a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant
men even when aggrieved— this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over

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Steelkilt.
“Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily exhaustion he
was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping the deck was not his
business, and he would not do it. And then, without at all alluding to the shovel,
he pointed to three lads, as the customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the
pumps, had done little or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied, with an oath, in a
most domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command;
meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper’s club
hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.
“Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for all his
first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could but ill brook this
bearing in the mate; but somehow still smothering the conflagration within him,
without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed
Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding
him to do his bidding.
“Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily followed by
the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his intention not to
obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an awful
and unspeakable intimation with his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and
infatuated man; but it was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly
round the windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that
he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused
on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
“‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself.’ But
the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where the Lakeman stood fixed,
now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating
a string of insufferable maledictions. Retreating not the thousandth part of an
inch; stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt,
clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his
persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would murder
him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods.
Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw of the
mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale.
“Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays leading far
aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their mastheads. They were both
Canallers.
“‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have seen many whaleships in our harbors,
but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are they?’
“‘Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must
have heard of it.’
“‘Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, we
know but little of your vigorous North.’
“‘Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha’s very fine; and ere proceeding
further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such information may throw
side-light upon my story.’
“For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth
of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving
villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields,
unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies

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of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by
happy hearts or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble
Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand
almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often
lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where
you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug
patronizing lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of
your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so
sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.
“‘Is that a friar passing?’ said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded
plazza, with humorous concern.
“‘Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in Lima,’
laughed Don Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’
“‘A moment! Pardon!’ cried another of the company. ‘In the name of all us
Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means
overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your
corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look surprised: you know the proverb all
along this coast—”Corrupt as Lima.” It but bears out your saying, too; churches
more plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open-and “Corrupt as Lima.” So,
too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark!—St.
Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.’
“Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine
dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Antony,
for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly
toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny
deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the
Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand
features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats;
his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on
his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him
heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming
qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a
poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what
the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild
whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce
any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling
captains. Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many
thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary
life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a
Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.
“‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon his
silvery ruffles. ‘No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had thought, now, that at
your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.— But the
story.’
“I had left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly
had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four
harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the ropes like
baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their
man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in

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this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm’s way, the
valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to
manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At
intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into
the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But
Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in gaining
the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large casks in a line
with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.
“‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing them with
a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. ‘Come out of that, ye
cut-throats!’
“Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the
worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that his
(Steelkilt’s) death would be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all
hands. Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little
desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.
“‘Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?’ demanded their ringleader.
“‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise; to your duty! Do you want to sink the
ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!’ and he once more raised a pistol.
“‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to,
unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say ye, men?’ turning to
his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.
“The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on the
Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:— ‘It’s not our fault; we didn’t
want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was boy’s business; he might have
known me before this; I told him not to prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a
finger here against his cursed jaw; ain’t those mincing knives down in the forecastle
there, men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to yourself;
say the word; don’t be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us decently,
and we’re your men; but we won’t be flogged.’
“‘Turn to! I make no promises, t to, I say!’
“‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him, ‘there are a
few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for the cruise, d’ye see; now
as you well know, sir, we can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so
we don’t want a row; it’s not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to
work, but we won’t be flogged.’
“‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain.
“Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—‘I tell you what it is now,
Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won’t lift a
hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging us,
we don’t do a hand’s turn.’
“‘Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there till ye’re sick of
it. Down ye go.’
“‘Shall we?’ cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it; but
at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark den,
growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.
“As the Lakeman’s bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain and
his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide of the scuttle,
planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called for the steward to bring the

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heavy brass padlock belonging to the companionway.

Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something down the crack,
closed it, and turned the key upon them—ten in number— leaving on deck some
twenty or more, who thus far had remained neutral.
“All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and aft,
especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which last place it was
feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking through the bulkhead below.
But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who still remained at their duty
toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the
dreary night dismally resounded through the ship.
“At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned the
prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then lowered down to
them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed after it; when again turning
the key upon them and pocketing it, the Captain returned to the quarter-deck.
Twice every day for three days this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a
confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons
was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they
were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united
perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at
discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the rest, but
Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling and betake himself
where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others of the mutineers bolted up
into the air from the desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three
were left.
“‘Better turn to, now?’ said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
“‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried Steelkilt.
“Oh! certainly,” said the Captain, and the key clicked.
“It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven of his
former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last hailed him, and
maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as the bowels of despair; it
was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one
mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison;
and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements
with a handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by
any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would do
this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the last night he should
spend in that den. But the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other
two; they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for anything
in short but a surrender. And what was more, they each insisted upon being the
first man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come. But to this their
leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as his
two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter; and both of them
could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a time. And here,
gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants must come out.
“Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own separate soul
had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece of treachery, namely: to
be the foremost in breaking out, in order to be the first of the three, though the last
of the ten, to surrender; and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such
conduct might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead

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them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed their
before secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell into a doze, verbally
opened their souls to each other in three sentences; and bound the sleeper with
cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.
“Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and all
his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a few minutes the
scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still struggling ringleader was
shoved up into the air by his perfidious allies, who at once claimed the honor of
securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared,
and dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into
the mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till morning.
‘Damn ye,’ cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them, ‘the vultures would not
touch ye, ye villains!’
“At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled from
those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a good
mind to flog them all round—thought, upon the while, he would do so—he ought
to—justice demanded it; but for the present, considering their timely surrender,
he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the
vernacular.
“‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues,’ turning to the three men in the rigging—‘for
you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;’ and, seizing a rope, he applied it with
all his might to the backs of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly
hung their heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
“‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he cried, at last; ‘but there is still rope enough
left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn’t give up. Take that gag from his mouth,
and let us hear what he can say for himself.’
“For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his cramped
jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss, ‘What I say
is this—and mind it well— if you flog me, I murder you!’
“‘Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me’—and the Captain drew off with the
rope to strike.
“‘Best not,’ hissed the Lakeman.
“‘But I must,’—and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
“Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain; who, to the
amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly two or three times,
and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, ‘I won’t do it—let him go— cut
him down: d’ye hear?’
But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man, with a
bandaged head, arrested them—Radney the chief mate. Ever since the blow, he had
lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the tumult on the deck, he had crept
out, and thus far had watched the whole scene. Such was the state of his mouth,
that he could hardly speak; but mumbling something about his being willing and
able to do what the captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced
to his pinioned foe.
“‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman.
“‘So I am, but take that.’ The mate was in the very act of striking, when another
hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing no more, made good his
word, spite of Steelkilt’s threat, whatever that might have been. The three men
were then cut down, all hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody

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seamen, the iron pumps clanged as before.

“Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor was heard
in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up, besieged the cabin door,
saying they durst not consort with the crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not
drive them back, so at their own instance they were put down in the ship’s run for
salvation. Still, no sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it
seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt’s instigation, they had resolved to maintain the
strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship reached port,
desert her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest end to the voyage, they all
agreed to another thing—namely, not to sing out for whales, in case any should be
discovered. For, spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still
maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish
that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney
the mate was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged
mouth seek to gag in death the vital jaw of the whale.
“But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of passive-
ness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all was over) concerning
his own proper and private revenge upon the man who had stung him in the ventri-
cles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief mate’s watch; and as if the infatuated
man sought to run more than half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the
rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the
head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances, Steelkilt
systematically built the plan of his revenge.
“During the night, Radney had an unseaman-like way of sitting on the bulwarks
of the quarterdeck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the boat which was
hoisted up there, a little above the ship’s side. In this attitude, it was well known,
he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable vacancy between the boat and the
ship, and down between this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found
that his next trick at the helm would come round at two o’clock, in the morning of
the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure, he employed
the interval in braiding something very carefully in his watches below.
“‘What are you making there?’ said a shipmate.
“‘What do you think? what does it look like?’
“‘Like a lanyard for your bag; but it’s an odd one, seems to me.’
‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the Lakeman, holding it at arm’s length before him; ‘but
I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven’t enough twine,—have you any?’
“But there was none in the forecastle.
“‘Then I must get some from old Rad;’ and he rose to go aft.
“‘You don’t mean to go a begging to him!’ said a sailor.
“‘Why not? Do you think he won’t do me a turn, when it’s to help himself in the
end, shipmate?’ and going to the mate, he looked at him quietly, and asked him for
some twine to mend his hammock. It was given him—neither twine nor lanyard
were seen again; but the next night an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from
the pocket of the Lakeman’s monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his
hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm— nigh
to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to the seaman’s
hand—that fatal hour was then to come; and in the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt,
the mate was already stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.
“But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he

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had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the avenger. For by a
mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its
own the damning thing he would have done.
“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second day,
when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing
water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she rolls! there she rolls!’
Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have
christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’
“‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;— but that
would be too long a story.’
“‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now.
Let me get more into the air, Sirs.’
“‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend looks faint;—fill
up his empty glass!’
“No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so suddenly
perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship— forgetful of the compact
among the crew—in the excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinc-
tively and involuntarily lifted his voice for the monster, though for some little time
past it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a
phrensy. ‘The White Whale—the White Whale!’ was the cry from captain, mates,
and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious to capture
so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses,
the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling
sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a
strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out
before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate,
and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood up
with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command.
Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate’s got the start; and none
howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After
a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to the
bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry
was, to beach him on the whale’s topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled
him up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of
a sudden the boat struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out
the standing mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale’s slippery back, the boat
righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the
sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray, and, for an
instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from
the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized
the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong
again, and went down.
“Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the
line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his own
thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his
knife to the line. He cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby
Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney’s red woollen shirt, caught in the teeth

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that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them,
and finally wholly disappeared.
“In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary place— where
no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or six of
the foremastmen deliberately deserted among the palms; eventually, as it turned
out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other
harbor.
“The ship’s company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called upon the
Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving down the ship to stop
the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over their dangerous allies was this small
band of whites necessitated, both by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard
work they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in
such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so heavy
a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the ship as far off shore
as possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon from the bows; stacked his muskets
on the poop; and warning the Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took
one man with him, and setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight
before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a reinforcement to
his crew.
“On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to have
touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the savage craft bore
down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would
run him under water. The captain presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of
the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the
pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam.
“‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain.
“‘Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?’ demanded Steelkilt; ‘no
lies.’
“‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’
“‘Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.’ With that he leaped
from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with
the captain.
“‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As soon as
Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder island, and remain there
six days. If I do not, may lightning strike me!’
“‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping into the sea,
he swam back to his comrades.
“Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots of the
cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time arrived at Tahiti, his own
place of destination. There, luck befriended him; two ships were about to sail for
France, and were providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the
sailor headed. They embarked, and so for ever got the start of their former captain,
had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution.
“Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and the
captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized Tahitians, who had been
somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small native schooner, he returned with
them to his vessel; and finding all right there, again resumed his cruisings.
“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of Nantucket,
the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead; still in

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dreams sees the awful white whale that destroyed him.

“‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, quietly.
“‘I am, Don.’
“‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this your
story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an
unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press.’
“‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian’s suit,’ cried
the company, with exceeding interest.
“‘Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?’
“‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know a worthy priest near by, who will quickly
procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised? this may grow too serious.’
“‘Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?’
“‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fe’s in Lima now,’ said one of the company to
another; ‘I fear our sailor friend runs risks of the archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw
more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.’
“‘Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that you
will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists you can.’
‘This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,’ said Don Sebastian, gravely,
returning with a tall and solemn figure.
“‘Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and hold
the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
“‘So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in
substance and its great items, true. I know it to be true; it happened on this ball; I
trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death
of Radney.”

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Chapter LV
Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the
true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in
his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whaleship so that he can
be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert
to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day
confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in
this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.
It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found
among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever since those
inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of temples, the
pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was
drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin’s, and a helmeted head like St. George’s;
ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not only in most
popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him.
Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be
the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephants, in India.
The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial
pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were
prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being. No wonder then, that
in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth.
The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting
the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse
Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give
the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like
the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale’s majestic
flukes.
But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter’s portrait
of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido’s
picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where
did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth,
in painting the same scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit
better. The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface,
scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its
distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the
Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are
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the Prodromus whales of the old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale, as depicted in
the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said of these? As
for the book-binder’s whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending
anchor— as stamped and gilded on the backs and titlepages of many books both old
and new—that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it,
from the like figures on antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin,
I nevertheless call this book-binder’s fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so
intended when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old Italian
publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival of Learning; and in
those days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly
supposed to be a species of the Leviathan.
In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at
times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets
d’eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his
unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original edition of the “Advancement of
Learning” you will find some curious whales.
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures
of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In
old Harris’s collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a
Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the
ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.” In one of those plates
the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with white
bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is
made of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.
Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post
Captain in the English navy, entitled “A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South
Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.” In this book is
an outline purporting to be a “Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by
scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.” I
doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines.
To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied,
according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make the
eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why
did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!
Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit
of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that
popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In the abridged London edition of
1807, there are plates of an alleged “whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem
inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for
the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth
century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of
schoolboys.
Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great naturalist,
published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of the
different species of the Leviathan. All these are not only incorrect, but the picture of
the Mysticetus or Greenland whale (that is to say the Right whale), even Scoresby, a
long experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart
in nature.
But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for

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the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he published
a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm
Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for
your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale
is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling
voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell?
Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one
of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively
lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of
oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally Richard III. whales, with
dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that
is whaleboats full of mariners: their deformities floundering in seas of blood and
blue paint.
But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising
after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the
stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with
broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed
pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the
living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living
whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable
waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle
ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to
hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.
And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young
suckling whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of
those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s deck, such is then the outlandish,
eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself
could not catch.
But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale,
accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the
more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of
his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs for candelabra
in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed
utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal characteristics;
yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan’s articulated bones.
In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same
relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis
that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head,
as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously
displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of
the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the
index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their
fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. “However recklessly
the whale may sometimes serve us,” said humorous Stubb one day, “he can never be
truly said to handle us without mittens.”
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude
that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain
unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than

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Moby-Dick 198

another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there
is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the
only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by
going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally
stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious
in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

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Chapter LVI
Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of
Whales and the True Pictures of
Whaling Scenes

In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here

to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found in
certain books, both ancient and modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt,
Harris, Cuvier, & c. But I pass that matter by.
I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett’s,
Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous chapter Colnett and
Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far better than theirs; but, by great
odds, Beale’s is the best. All Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting
the middle figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his
second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt
calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and
life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne
are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his
fault though.
Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are drawn
on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has but one picture of
whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when
at all well done, that you can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale
as seen by his living hunters.
But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the most
correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two
large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery.
Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first
engraving a noble Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen
beneath the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the. air
upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of the boat is
partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster’s spine; and
standing in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold
an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the
act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully
good and true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden
Moby-Dick 200

poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew
are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the
black stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon the scene. Serious fault might
be found with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the
life of me, I could not draw so good a one.
In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled
flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like
some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black
like soot; so that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there
must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at
the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right
Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped
leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his
wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the
paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the fore-ground is all raging commotion;
but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the
drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale,
a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole
inserted into his spout-hole.
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was
either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously tutored by some
experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze
upon all the paintings in Europe, and where will you find such a gallery of living
and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where
the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of
France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive
armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly
unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.
The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things
seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of their
whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s experience in the fishery, and not
the thousandth part of that of the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both
nations with the only finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of
the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen
seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as the
vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of effect is concerned,
is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly
renowned Right whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale,
and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a
series of classical engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and
with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a
shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean
no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran), but in so
important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every
crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.
In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other French
engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself “H. Durand.” One of
them, though not precisely adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves
mention on other accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a

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Moby-Dick 201

French whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the
loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both
drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when considered with
reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few aspects of
oriental repose. The other engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to
upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale
alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a
quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving
chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for use; three
oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea,
the little craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship,
the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a
village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls
and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.

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Chapter LVII
Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood;
in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains;
in Stars

On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled
beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, repre-
senting the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three
boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original
integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten
years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump
to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three
whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and
his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings.
But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor
whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own
amputation.
Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor,
you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the
fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks wrought out of the
Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call
the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough
material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-
looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But, in
general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool
of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner’s
fancy.
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that
condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-
hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no
allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel
against him.
Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is
his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle,
in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human
perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s
Moby-Dick 203

tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has
cost steady years of steady application.
As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same
marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of his one poor jack-
knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as
close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and
full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage,
Albert Durer.
Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble
South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers.
Some of them are done with much accuracy.
At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the
tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed
whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful
essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales
placed there for weathercocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
intents and purposes so labelled with “Hands off!” you cannot examine them closely
enough to decide upon their merit.
In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses
of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover
images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a
windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges.
Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled
by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will
catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges.
But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but
if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact
intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are
such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would require
a laborious re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which still remain incognita,
though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.
Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great
whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled
with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the
clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with
the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath
the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase
against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying
Fish.
With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs,
would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the
fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal
sight!

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Chapter LVIII
Brit

Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit,
the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For
leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through
boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the
attack of a Sperm-Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through
the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in
their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lips.
As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes
through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making
a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue
upon the yellow sea.*
That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does not bear
that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows and
soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused
by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, where the Right
Whale is often chased.
But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all reminded
one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused and were
stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock
than anything else. And as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger at
a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing
them to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so,
often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the
sea. And even when recognized at last, their immense magnitude renders it very
hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct,
in all parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.
Indeed. in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with
the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old naturalists
have maintained that all creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea; and
though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may very well be; yet coming
to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition
answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any
generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever
Moby-Dick 205

been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know
the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless
unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds,
the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately
befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;
though but a moment’s consideration will teach that, however baby man may brag
of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and
skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will
insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make;
nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost
that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance
had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean
rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish
mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle
upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the
feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for
ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the live sea
swallows up ships and crews.
But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend
to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests;
sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that
tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest
whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks
of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a
mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under
water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest
tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most
remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks.
Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey
upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth;
consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to
something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in
the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed
by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle,
thou canst never return!

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Chapter LIX
Squid

Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way north-
eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the
surrounding serenity her three tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid
breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery
night, the lonely, alluring jet would be seen.
But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread
over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished
sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some
secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this
profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the
main-mast-head.
In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher,
and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a
snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it
subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently gleamed. It seemed not a
whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down,
but on re-appearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from
his nod, the negro yelled out—“There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead!
The White Whale, the White Whale!”
Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees
rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and
with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman,
cast his eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless
arm of Daggoo.
Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had gradually
worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the ideas of mildness
and repose with the first sight of the particular whale he pursued; however this
was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him; whichever way it might have been, no
sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he
instantly gave orders for lowering.
The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly pulling
towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were
awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly
rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed
at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed
Moby-Dick 207

to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing

cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its
centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch
at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no
conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows,
an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at
the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed—“Almost rather
had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned
to their ports to tell of it.”
But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as
silently following.
Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the
sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual, that
circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld,
that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest animated thing in the
ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true
nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his
only food. For though other species of whales find their food above water, and may
be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food
in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can
tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will
disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus
exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster
to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and
that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack
and tear it.
There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontop-
podan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop
describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some other particulars he nar-
rates, in all this the two correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect
to the incredible bulk he assigns it.
By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious creature,
here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in
certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.

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Chapter LX
The Line

With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better
understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the
magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.
The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly vapored
with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as
ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders
the rope itself more convenient to the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only
would the ordinary quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling
to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in
general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, however much it may
give it compactness and gloss.
Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely
superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp,
it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics
in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp
is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian
to behold.
The whale-line is only two thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would
not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each
suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will
bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line
measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it
is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so
as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded “sheaves,” or layers
of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the “heart,” or minute vertical
tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling
would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body off, the
utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will
consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft
and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of
coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists.
In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line being
continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this; because these
twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the boat, and do not strain it so
much; whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in diameter and of proportionate
Moby-Dick 209

depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are but one-half inch
in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up
a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one. When
the painted canvas cover is clapped on the american line-tub, the boat looks as if it
were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales.
Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or
loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its
edge completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end
is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an
additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so
deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon.
In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from
the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at hand to assist
its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety’s sake;
for were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the
whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he
sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be
dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier
would ever find her again.
Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft
from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the
entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man’s
oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men,
as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves
in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size
of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a
slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some
ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it
continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to
the short-warp— the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but
previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too
tedious to detail.
Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and
writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in
its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as
Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor
can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen
intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any
unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions
be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a
shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken
jelly. Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies,
more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your
mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whaleboat, when
thus hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King
Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter
around every neck, as you may say.
Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated
whaling disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of this man or that

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man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting
out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold
whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and
wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these
perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the
other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy
and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa
of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of
the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but
the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly
harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful
repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought
into actual play— this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other
aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-
lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in
the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, everpresent
perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you
would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your
evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

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Chapter LXI
Stubb Kills a Whale

If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it

was quite a different object.
“When you see him ’quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow of his
hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ‘parm whale.”
The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage
them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a
vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging
is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of
porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters,
than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning
against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an
enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all
consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued
to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the
main and mizzen mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us
lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod
from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent
crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over
all.
Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands
grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock
I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic
Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad,
glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror. But
lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting
his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm
afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter’s
wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness;
and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the
three notes from aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly
and regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.
“Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he dashed
the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
Moby-Dick 212

The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the
boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such
a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all
he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used,
and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the
gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting
of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster
perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like
a tower swallowed up.
“There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb’s
producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the
full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in
advance of the smoker’s boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb
counted upon the honor of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had
at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore
no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still
puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.
Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he was
going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he
brewed.*
It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire
interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though apparently the most
massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So that with ease he elevates
it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such
is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering
cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he
thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a
sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
“Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take plenty of time—but
start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s all,” cried Stubb, spluttering out the
smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now; give ’em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego.
Start her, Tash, my boy— start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the
word— easy, easy—only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the
buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys— that’s all. Start her!”
“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old war-
whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat involuntarily bounced
forward with the one tremendous leading stroke which the eager Indian gave.
But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee-hee! Kee-hee!”
yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat, like a pacing tiger in
his cage.
“Ka-la! Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful of
Grenadier’s steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile,
Stubb, retaining his place in the van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all
the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and
they strained, till the welcome cry was heard—“Stand up, Tashtego!—give it to
him!” The harpoon was hurled. “Stern all!” The oarsmen backed water; the same
moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was
the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns
with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a

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Moby-Dick 213

hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe.
As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching
that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb’s hands, from
which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times,
had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged sword by
the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
“Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the
tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed the sea-water into it.* More turns were
taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now flew through the
boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed places—stem
for stern—a staggering business truly in that rocking commotion.
Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that,
in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with water; in
many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat,
however, is the most convenient.
From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat,
and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would have thought the
craft had two keels—one cleaving the water, the other the air—as the boat churned
on through both opposing elements at once. A continual cascade played at the bows;
a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within,
even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic
gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging to
his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at the
steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity.
Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length
the whale somewhat slackened his flight.
“Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round towards the
whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being
towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the
clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the
boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, and then
ranging up for another fling.
The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill.
His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for
furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in
the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other
like red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot
from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the
excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line
attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows against
the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.
“Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in
his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along the fish’s flank. When
reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish,
and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel
after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was
fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the
innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that
unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” the monster horribly wallowed in his blood,

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Moby-Dick 214

overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled

craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that
phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view! surging
from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp,
cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it
had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frightened air; and falling back
again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.
“Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb
scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully
eyeing the vast corpse he had made.

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Chapter LXII
The Dart

A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.

According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from
the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary steersman, and the har-
pooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-
oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for
often, in what is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the
distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase,
the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is
expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible
rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep
shouting at the top of one’s compass, while all the other muscles are strained and
half started— what that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot
bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this
straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted
harpooneer hears the exciting cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He now has to
drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from
the crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow
into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of
fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless
harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually
burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are
absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is
but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take
the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!
Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when
the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to running
fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is then
they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his
proper station in the bows of the boat.
Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and
unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should
both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of
him, except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would
sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in various
whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of
Moby-Dick 216

failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale
as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must
start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.

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Chapter LXIII
The Crotch

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive
subjects, grow the chapters.
The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It is a
notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly
inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing
a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoons, whose other naked, barbed end
slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its
hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his
rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch,
respectively called the first and second irons.
But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the line;
the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly after the other into
the same whale; so that if, in the coming drag, one should draw out, the other may
still retain a hold. It is a doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that
owing to the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving
the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in
his movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second iron
is already connected with the line, and the line is running, hence that weapon must,
at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere;
else the most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water, it
accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding
chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently practicable. But this critical
act is not always unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties.
Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard,
it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about
both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious
sensation in all directions. Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the
whale is fairly captured and a corpse.
Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one unusually
strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities in him, as well as
to the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten
loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each
boat is supplied with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be
ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are faithfully narrated
here, as they will not fail to elucidate several most important however intricate
Moby-Dick 218

passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.

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Chapter LXIV
Stubb’s Supper

Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so,
forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of towing the
trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and
one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that
inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long
intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we
moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in China,
four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate
of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden
with piglead in bulk.
Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s main-rigging
dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several
more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment,
he issued the usual orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern
to a seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until
morning.
Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his
customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague
dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight
of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a
thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance
his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the sound
on the Pequod’s decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep;
for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the
port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be
moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now
lies with its black hull close to the vessel’s, and seen through the darkness of the
night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two—ship and whale, seemed
yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other remains
standing.*
A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable hold
which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes or
tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier than any other
(excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath
the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to
Moby-Dick 220

put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong
line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle,
while the other end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float
is made to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale,
the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last
locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad
flukes or lobes.
If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck,
Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-
natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his
official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs.
One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely
manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale
as a flavorish thing to his palate.
“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one
from his small!”
Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general thing,
and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray the current
expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now
and then you find some of these Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for that
particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering
extremity of the body.
About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of
sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, as if
that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale’s flesh
that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on
thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on
its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp
slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers’ hearts.
Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing
in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out
huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular
feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable
surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of
the universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may
best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be
seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where
red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them;
and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally
carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the
sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under
the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside
down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking
sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable
outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside,
to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently
buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the
set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most

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hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find
them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a
dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen
that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the
expediency of conciliating the devil.
But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so
nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips.
“Cook, cook!—where’s that old Fleece?” he cried at length, widening his legs
still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same time
darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; “cook, you cook!— sail
this way, cook!”
The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously routed from his
warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his galley,
for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which
he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him,
came shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a
clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered
along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on the opposite
side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and resting on
his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time
sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play.
“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, “don’t
you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been beating this steak too much,
cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be
tough? There are those sharks now over the side, don’t you see they prefer it tough
and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to ’em; tell ’em they
are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet.
Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and deliver my message. Here,
take this lantern,” snatching one from his sideboard; “now then, go and preach to
them!”
Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the
bulwarks; and then, with one hand drooping his light low over the sea, so as to get a
good view of his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs,
and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks,
while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.
“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare.
You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lips! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your
dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!”
“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the
shoulder,—Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way when you’re
preaching. That’s no way to convert sinners, Cook! Who dat? Den preach to him
yourself,” sullenly turning to go.
No, Cook; go on, go on.”
“Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—
“Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ’em to it, try that,” and Fleece
continued.
“Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-
critters, dat dat woraciousness—‘top dat dam slappin’ ob de tail! How you tink to
hear, ‘spose you keep up such a dam slapping and bitin’ dare?”

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“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I won’t have that swearing. Talk to ’em
gentlemanly.”
Once more the sermon proceeded.
“Your woraciousness, fellow-critters. I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur,
and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks,
sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is
not’ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to
be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your
neighbour’s mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by
Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I
know some o’ you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts
sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness of de mout is not to swallar wid,
but to bit off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can’t get into de scrouge to
help demselves.”
“Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go on.”
“No use goin’ on; de dam willains will keep a scrougin’ and slappin’ each oder,
Massa Stubb; dey don’t hear one word; no use a-preaching to such dam g’uttons as
you call ’em, till dare bellies is full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do
get ’em full, dey wont hear you den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de
coral, and can’t hear noting at all, no more, for eber and eber.”
“Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece,
and I’ll away to my supper.”
Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his shrill voice,
and cried—
“Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam
bellies ‘till dey bust—and den die.”
“Now, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; Stand just where
you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular attention.”
“All ’dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the desired
position.
“Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile;
“I shall now go back to the subject of this steak.
In the first place, how old are you, cook?”
“What dat do wid de ‘teak, “ said the old black, testily.
“Silence! How old are you, cook?”
“‘Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
And have you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and
don’t know yet how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting another mouthful at the
last word, so that that morsel seemed a continuation of the question. “Where were
you born, cook?”
“‘Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.”
“Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what country you
were born in, cook!”
“Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried sharply.
“No, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, cook. You must go home
and be born over again; you don’t know how to cook a whale-steak yet.”
“Bress my soul, if I cook noder one,” he growled, angrily, turning round to depart.
“Come back here, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take that bit of
steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be? Take

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Moby-Dick 223

it, I say”—holding the tongs towards him—“take it, and taste it.”
Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro muttered,
“Best cooked ’teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.”
“Cook,” said Stubb, squaring himself once more; “do you belong to the church?”
“Passed one once in Cape-Down,” said the old man sullenly.
“And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where you
doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his beloved fellow-
creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and tell me such a dreadful lie as
you did just now, eh?” said Stubb. “Where do you expect to go to, cook?”
“Go to bed berry soon,” he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
“Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It’s an awful question. Now what’s
your answer?”
“When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and
demeanor, “he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some bressed angel will come and fetch
him.”
“Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him
where?”
“Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and keeping it
there very solemnly.
“So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you are dead?
But don’t you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets? Main-top, eh?”
“Didn’t say dat t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks.
“You said up there, didn’t you? and now look yourself, and see where your tongs
are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the
lubber’s hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don’t get there, except you go the regular
way, round by the rigging. It’s a ticklish business, but must be done, or else it’s no
go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do
ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t’other a’top of your heart, when I’m
giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?— that’s your gizzard! Aloft!
aloft!—that’s it—now you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention.”
“All ’dention,” said the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly
wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time.
“Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have
put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don’t you? Well, for the future,
when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I’ll
tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand,
and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear? And now
to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the
tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them
soused, cook. There, now ye may go.”
But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear?
away you sail then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.— Avast heaving
again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t forget.”
“Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ‘stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he ain’t
more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old man, limping away; with
which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.

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Chapter LXV
The Whale as a Dish

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb,
eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one
must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.
It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was
esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there. Also, that
in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain cook of the court obtained a handsome reward
for inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you
remember, are a species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine
eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well
seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. The old monks
of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise grant from the
crown.
The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be
considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit
down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.
Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales;
but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales,
and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous
doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly juicy and
nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who long ago were
accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel— that these men actually lived
for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore
after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called
“fritters”; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling
something like old Amsterdam housewives’ dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh.
They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep
his hands off.
But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his exceeding
richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good. Look
at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the buffalo’s (which is esteemed
a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself,
how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent, half jellied, white meat of a
cocoanut in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute
for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some
other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it is a
Moby-Dick 225

common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let
them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made.
In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The
casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes
being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed
with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling
calves’ head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and every one knows that
some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves’ brains,
by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf ’s
head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And
that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf ’s head before
him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of
reproachfully at him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.
It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that
landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result,
in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat
a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt
the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he
was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have
been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market
of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows
of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw?
Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee
that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be
more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee,
civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest
on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult
to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened
gourmand, dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the
bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your
teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And
with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to
Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that
that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.

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Chapter LXVI
The Shark Massacre

When in the Southern Fishery a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil,
is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to
proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly
laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it.
Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send
every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that
time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple,
the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well.
But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer
at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase,
that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton
would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these
fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure
notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still
greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod’s sharks;
though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her
side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge
cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.
Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was con-
cluded; and when, accordingly Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck,
no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending
the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast
long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long
whaling-spades,* kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the
keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy
confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit
their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the
foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like
flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed
over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping
wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of
these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very
joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed
and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor
Moby-Dick 227

Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.
The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about the
bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to the garden
implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly flat, and its upper
end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as
possible; and when being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket,
a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly lifting
his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made
shark must be one dam Ingin.”

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Chapter LXVII
Cutting In

It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of

Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed
a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten
thousand red oxen to the sea gods.
In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous things
comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man
can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and
firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere above a ship’s
deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was then
conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung
over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred
pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and
Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for
the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a
broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main
body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense
crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side;
every bolt in her starts like the nailheads of an old house in frosty weather; she
trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more
she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered
by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard;
with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the
triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular
end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely
as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an
orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up
by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water,
and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the “scarf,”
simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as
fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time
being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the
men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious
blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one
present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears
and pitch him headlong overboard.
Moby-Dick 229

One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon called
a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out a considerable
hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second
alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber,
in order to prepare for what follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman,
warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and
with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging, slicings, severs it completely in twain; so
that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a blanket-
piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume
their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the
whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through
the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-
room. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the
long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the
work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale
and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the
mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of
assuaging the general friction.

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Chapter LXVIII
The Blanket

I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale.
I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned
naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an
opinion.
The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale. Already you know what
his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained
beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve
and fifteen inches in thickness.
Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature’s skin
as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no
arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense
enveloping layer from the whale’s body but that same blubber; and the outermost
enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin?
True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your
hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest
shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous
to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard
and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books.
It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have
sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any
rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may
say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass
substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be
regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were
simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner
and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.
Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in
the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels
of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its
expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some
idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of
whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels
to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of
the whale’s skin.
In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many
Moby-Dick 231

marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed
with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest
Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the
isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they
were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the
quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the
ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those
mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper
word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics
upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing
the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the
banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked
whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of
another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm
Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks,
effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude
scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New
England rocks on the seacoast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent
scraping contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must
not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that
such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales;
for I have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.
A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It
has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces.
Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed
wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an
Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this
cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable
in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland
whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy
surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters;
but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies
are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg,
as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the
whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful
is it then—except after explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal
warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at
home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall
overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen
into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising
is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is
warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual
vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness.
Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm
among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator;
keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the
great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few

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Moby-Dick 232

are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!

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Chapter LXIX
The Funeral

Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded
whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly
lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the
water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed
with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting
poniards in the whale.The vast white headless phantom floats further and further
from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and
cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the
almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild
azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that
great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious
mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of
them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but
upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vulturism
of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.
Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and
hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-
vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still
shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against
it; straightway the whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in
the log—shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards,
perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum,
because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There’s your law
of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate
survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in
the air! There’s orthodoxy!
Thus, while in the life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his
foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-
Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
Chapter LXX
The Sphynx

It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body
of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a
scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride
themselves: and not without reason.
Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the
contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that very place, is the
thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must operate from above,
some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and that subject
almost hidden in a discolored, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea.
Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet
deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting
one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer
clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point
hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb’s boast, that
he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?
When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable till the
body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it is hoisted on deck to be
deliberately disposed of. But, with a full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the
sperm whale’s head embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to
suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were
as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers’ scales.
The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was
hoisted against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet
in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And there with the strained
craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the
lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the
waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant
Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith.
When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below
to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck.
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding
its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from
his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the
side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb’s long spade still
Moby-Dick 235

remaining there after the whale’s decapitation and striking it into the lower part of
the half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutchwise under one arm, and so
stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense
a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable
head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there
lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that
is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the
upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded
names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous
hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in
that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where
bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers
would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping
from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true
to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate
when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper
midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed— while
swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous
husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the
planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”
“Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while
whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry upon this deadly
calm might almost convert a better man.—Where away?”
“Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!
“Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to
my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond
all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on
matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”

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Chapter LXXI
The Jeroboam’s Story

Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship,
and soon the Pequod began to rock.
By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads proved
her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting by, apparently
making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So
the signal was set to see what response would be made.
Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of the American
Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals being collected in a book
with the names of the respective vessels attached, every captain is provided with
it. Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the
ocean, even at considerable distance, and with no small facility.
The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s setting her own;
which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she
bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod’s lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew
nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged by Starbuck’s order to accommodate
the visiting captain, the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat’s stern in
token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the Jeroboam
had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of
infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though himself and the boat’s crew remained
untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea
and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid
quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the
Pequod.
But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an interval of
some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam’s boat by the occasional
use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged through
the sea (for by this time it blew very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though,
indeed, at times by the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be
pushed some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings
again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a conversation
was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not without still another
interruption of a very different sort.
Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even
in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities. He was
a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing
Moby-Dick 237

redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge

enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A
deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed— “That’s he!
that’s he!—the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho’s company told us of!” Stubb
here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among
her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to
this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in
question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the Jeroboam.
His story was this:
He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers,
where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several
times descended from heaven by the way of a trapdoor, announcing the speedy
opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead
of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange,
apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where,
with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common sense exterior,
and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam’s whaling voyage.
They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship’s getting out of sight of land, his
insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and
commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby
he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all
Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he declared these things;—the
dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural
terrors of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of
the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of
him. As such a man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship, especially
as he refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous captain would fain
have been rid of him; but apprised that that individual’s intention was to land
him in the first convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and
vials—devoting the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this
intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the
crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel was
sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was therefore forced to
relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any way maltreated, say or
do what he would; so that it came to pass that Gabriel had the complete freedom of
the ship. The consequence of all this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing
for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a
higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole
command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors,
mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in obedience to his
instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such things
may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of
fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic
himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But
it is time to return to the Pequod.
“I fear not thy epidemic, man,” said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain Mayhew,
who stood in the boat’s stern; “come on board.”
But now Gabriel started to his feet.

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Moby-Dick 238

“Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious!

Beware of the horrible plague!”
“Gabriel! Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either-” But that instant a
headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech.
“Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back.
“Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!”
“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that-” But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by
fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves
rolled by which by one of those occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling,
not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very
violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than
his archangel nature seemed to warrant.
When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning
Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever
his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.
It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a
whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the
havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned
the captain against attacking the White Whale, in case the monster should be seen;
in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than
the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year
or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the
chief mate, burned with ardor to encounter him; and the captain himself being not
unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel’s denunciations
and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat. With
them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful
onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending
to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling
forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now,
while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat’s bow, and with all the reckless
energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying
to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea;
by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the
oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily
into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of
about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman’s
head; but the mate for ever sank.
It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale
Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is
injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener the boat’s bow is knocked
off, or the thigh-board, on which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and
accompanies the body. But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more
instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence
is discernible the man being stark dead.
The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the
ship. Raising a piercing shriek—“The vial! the vial!” Gabriel called off the terror-
stricken crew from the further hunting of the whale. This terrible event clothed
the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples believed that
he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy,

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Moby-Dick 239

which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in
the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.
Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him, that
the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he intended to hunt
the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which Ahab answered—“Aye.”
Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to his feet, glaring upon the old man,
and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger—“Think, think of the
blasphemer— dead, and down there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”
Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I have just bethought
me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck,
look over the bag.”
Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose
delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere
chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach
their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two or three years
or more.
Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp,
and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a
dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the
post-boy.
“Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give it me, man. Aye, aye, aye it’s but a dim
scrawl;—what’s this?” As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long cutting-spade
pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to insert the letter there, and in that
way, hand it to the boat, without its coming any closer to the ship.
Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, “Mr. Har— yes, Mr. Harry—(a
woman’s pinny hand,—the man’s wife, I’ll wager)—Aye—Mr. Harry Macey, Ship
Jeroboam; why it’s Macey, and he’s dead!”
“Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but let me have
it.”
“Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou art soon going that way.”
“Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive
it”; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s hands, he caught it in the slit
of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen
expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted a little towards the ship’s stern;
so that, as if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s eager hand.
He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it,
sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab’s feet. Then Gabriel shrieked
out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous
boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.
As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the
whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.

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Chapter LXXII
The Monkey-Rope

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much

running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here,
and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for
at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the
same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace
our way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s
back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of
the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed
in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty
it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special purpose
referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer
shall remain on the whale till the whole tensing or stripping operation is concluded.
The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate
parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the
poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast
mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg
figured in the Highland costume— a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at least,
he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe
him, as will presently be seen.
Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his
boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him
while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have
seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the
ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically
called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted
round his waist.
It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed
further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Quee-
queg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or
for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise
no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it
should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united
us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of
the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.
So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while
Moby-Dick 241

earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own indi-
viduality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had
received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge
innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a
sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so
gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then
from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further
pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every
mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese
connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your
apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say
that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous
other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would,
sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I
possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.*
The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that
the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the
original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford to
the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and
vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.
I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and
the ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying
of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled
by the massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now freshly and more
keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow from the carcass—the
rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside
with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by
such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will
seldom touch a man.
Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous finger
in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly, besides the
monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the poor fellow from too close a
vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark—he was provided
with still another protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego
and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades,
wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach. This procedure
of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and benevolent of them. They meant
Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and
from the circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half hidden
by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer
amputating a leg than a tall. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping
there with that great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo,
and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then
slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea— what matters it, after all? Are you not
the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded
ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and
what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.

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Moby-Dick 242

But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with
blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up the chains and
stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward advances,
and with a benevolent, consolatory glance hands him—what? Some hot Cognac?
No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water!
“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. “Yes,
this must be ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing as if
incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astonished steward slowly
saying, “Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy,
where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy,
to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is ginger?—
sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the devil is
ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here.”
“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,”
he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward.
“Will you look at that kannakin, sir; smell of it, if you please.” Then watching the
mate’s countenance, he added, “The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer
that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward
an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by which he
blows back the life into a half-drowned man?”
“I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”
“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug it harpooneer; none
of your apothecary’s medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got
out insurances on our lives and want to give way with their oars, and pocket the
proceeds, do ye?”
“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger
on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this ginger-
jub—so she called it.”
“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers,
and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain’s
orders— grog for the harpooneer on a whale.”
“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but-”
“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort;
and this fellow’s a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?”
“Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.”
When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort
of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to
Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that was freely given to the
waves.

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Chapter LXXIII
Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale;
and Then Have a Talk Over Him

It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s prodigious
head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it continue hanging there a
while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For the present other matters press,
and the best we can do now for the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted into
a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the
vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be
at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And though all hands commonly
disdained the capture of those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not
commissioned to cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them
near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been
brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made
that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.
Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats,
Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further away,
they at last became almost invisible to the men at the masthead. But suddenly in
the distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white water, and soon after news
came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and
the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by
the towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first it seemed
as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three
rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel.
“Cut, cut!” was the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on
the point of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel’s side. But having
plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid
out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their might so as to get
ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was intensely critical; for while
they still slacked out the tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars
in another, the contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only
a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it;
when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as
the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows,
snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits
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of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once
more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly
altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after him,
so that they performed a complete circuit.
Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him
on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and
round the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before
swum round the Sperm Whale’s body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled,
thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting
fountains that poured from the smitten rock.
At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon
his back a corpse.
While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and
in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued
between them.
“I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” said Stubb, not
without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so ignoble a leviathan.
“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s bow, “did you
never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s head hoisted on her
starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale’s on the larboard; did you never
hear, Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards capsize?”
“Why not?
“I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he
seems to know all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes think he’ll charm the ship
to no good at last. I don’t half like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that
tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake’s head, Stubb?”
“Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a dark night, and
he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down there, Flask”—pointing
into the sea with a peculiar motion of both hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that
Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about
his having been stowed away on board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The reason why
you don’t see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries it coiled away
in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of it, he’s always wanting oakum
to stuff into the toes of his boots.”
“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve seen him
lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”
“No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye see, in the
eye of the rigging.”
“What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”
“Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”
“Bargain?—about what?”
“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the devil
there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his
soul, or something of that sort, and then he’ll surrender Moby Dick.”
“Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?”
“I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I tell ye.
Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the old flag-ship once, switching
his tail about devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor
was at home. Well, he was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil,

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switching his hoofs, up and says, ‘I want John.’ ‘What for?’ says the old governor.
‘What business is that of yours,’ says the devil, getting mad,—‘I want to use him.’
‘Take him,’ says the governor— and by the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn’t give
John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with him, I’ll eat this whale in one
mouthful. But look sharp—ain’t you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and
let’s get the whale alongside.”
“I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” said Flask, when at
last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship, “but I
can’t remember where.”
“Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soldadoes? Did ye
read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?”
“No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you
suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is now
on board the Pequod?”
“Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live for ever;
who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a wearing
mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral’s
cabin, don’t you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?”
“How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”
“Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well, that’s the figure
one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold, and string ’em along in a row with
that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that wouldn’t begin to be Fedallah’s age. Nor
all the coopers in creation couldn’t show hoops enough to make oughts enough.”
“But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you meant to
give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if he’s so old as all those
hoops of yours come to, and if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to
pitch him overboard— tell me that?
“Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”
“But he’d crawl back.”
“Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”
“Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though— yes, and drown
you—what then?”
“I should like to see him try it; I’d give him such a pair of black eyes that he
wouldn’t dare to show his face in the admiral’s cabin again for a long while, let alone
down in the orlop there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where
he sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask; do you suppose I’m afraid of the devil?
Who’s afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn’t catch him and put him in
double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye, and
signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil kidnapped, he’d roast for him?
There’s a governor!”
“Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?”
“Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep a
sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going on, I’ll just take
him by the nape of his neck, and say—Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if
he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it
to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come
short off at the stump—do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself
docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling
his tail between his legs.”

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“And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?”

“Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?”
“Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?”
“Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.”
The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke
chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him.
“Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this right whale’s head
hoisted up opposite that parmacety’s.”
In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned
over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she
regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when
on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other
side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some
minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads
overboard, and then you will float light and right.
In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the
same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm whale;
only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the former the lips
and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck, with all the well known
black bone attached to what is called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the
present case, had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and
the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening
panniers.
Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever and
anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab
chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee’s
shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. As the
crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were bandied among them, concerning all
these passing things.

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Chapter LXXIV
The Sperm Whale’s Head —
Contrasted View

Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and
lay together our own.
Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are
by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To
the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the
whale. As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their heads;
and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod’s side; and as we
may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:—where, I
should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than
here?
In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads.
Both are massive enough in all conscience; but, there is a certain mathematical
symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right Whale’s sadly lacks. There is
more character in the Sperm Whale’s head. As you behold it, you involuntarily
yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity. In the present
instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt color of his head at
the summit, giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what
the fishermen technically call a “grey-headed whale.”
Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads— namely, the two most
important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of the head, and low
down, near the angle of either whale’s jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last
see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all
proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.
Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he
can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly
astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s
ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways
survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command
some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about
thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with
dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he
were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to
speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes
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the front of a man— what, indeed, but his eyes?

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so
planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture
and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided
as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great
mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the
impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see
one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all
between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect,
be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his
window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two
distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes
is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the
reader in some subsequent scenes.
A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual
matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a
man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot
then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any
one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating
sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and com-
pletely, to examine any two things—however large or however small— at one and
the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other.
But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of
profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring
your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary
consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves,
must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining,
and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine
two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite
direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able
simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid.
Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.
It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordi-
nary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or
four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales;
I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in
which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.
But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an entire stranger
to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for hours, and never discover
that organ. The ear has no external leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can
hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye.
With respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between the
sperm whale and the right. While the ears of the former has an external opening,
that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be
quite imperceptible from without.
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so
small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s?
But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears
capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight,

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or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind?
Subtilize it.
Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over
the sperm whale’s head, so, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a ladder
to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that the body is
now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend into the great
Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here by this tooth,
and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth!
from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane,
glossy as bridal satins.
But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the
long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end, instead of
one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it
seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the
fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it
to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there
suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at
right-angles with his body; for all the world like a ship’s jibboom. This whale is not
dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that
the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight,
a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him.
In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised artist—
is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth,
and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen
fashion all sorts of curious articles including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to
riding-whips.
With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor;
and when the proper time comes— some few days after the other work—Queequeg,
Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth.
With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down
to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as
Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild woodlands. There are generally
forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled
after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away
like joists for building houses.

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Chapter LXXV
The Right Whale’s Head — Contrasted
View

Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the the Right Whale’s head.
As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman
war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a broad
view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic
galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape
to that of a shoemaker’s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the
nursery tale with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and
all her progeny.
But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different aspects,
according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these two
f-shaped spout-holes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass viol, and
these spiracles, the apertures in its soundingboard. Then, again, if you fix your
eye upon this strange, crested, comblike incrustation on the top of the mass—this
green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the Southern
fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this, you would
take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird’s nest in its crotch. At
any rate, when you watch those live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an
idea will be almost sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by
the technical term “crown” also bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great
interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea,
whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But
if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look
at that hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by
carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout
that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.
A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure
is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing
down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this
lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were
I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good
Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and
runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while
these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical,
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scimitar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending

from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which
have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed
with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose
intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas
of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural
order, there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some
whalemen calculate the creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings.
Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor
of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater
age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.
In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning
these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous “whiskers” inside
of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a third old gentleman in Hackluyt
uses the following elegant language: “There are about two hundred and fifty fins
growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his tongue on each side of
his mouth.”
This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a
moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of the outer
end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression
to his otherwise solemn countenance.
As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,” “blinds,”
or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and other stiffening
contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has long been on the decline. It
was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then
all the fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws
of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness,
do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent
spread over the same bone.
But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the
Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone
so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great
Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we
have a rug of the softest Turkey—the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor
of the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting it on
deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I should say it was
a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that amount of oil.
Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with— that the
Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads. To sum
up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at
all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the
Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely
anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the
Sperm Whale only one.
Look your last now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together;
for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very long in
following.
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same he died
with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think

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his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference

as to death. But mark the other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip,
pressed by accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does
not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing
death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian,
who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

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Chapter LXXVI
The Battering-Ram

Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have you, as a sensible
physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted
collectedness. I would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming
to yourself some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram
power may be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily
settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of the most
appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded
history.
You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the
front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water; you observe
that the lower part of that front slopes considerably backwards, so as to furnish
more of a retreat for the long socket which receives the boom-like lower jaw; you
observe that the mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, indeed,
as though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe
that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he has—his spout hole—
is on the top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his
head; nearly one third of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must
now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale’s head is a dead, blind wall,
without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore,
you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part
of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get
near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial development.
So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will
soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you are
now to be apprised of the nature of the substance which so impregnably invests all
that apparent effeminacy. In some previous place I have described to you how the
blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the
head; but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick
is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The
severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm,
impotently rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were
paved with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.
Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indian-men
chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the sailors
do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming contact, any merely
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hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow
and cork, enveloped in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and
uninjured takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and
iron crow-bars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But
supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish
possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, at will, of distension
or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know, has no such provision in
him; considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses
his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out
of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope; considering the
unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those
mystical lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown
and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric
distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to
which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes.
Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and
this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life,
only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is— by the cord; and all obedient to
one volition, as the smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all
the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive
monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I
trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by this;
that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and
mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow.
For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth.
But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the
chances for the provincials then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread
goddess’s veil at Lais?

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Chapter LXXVII
The Great Heidelburgh Tun

Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know
something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated upon.
Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined
plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower is the bony structure,
forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from
bones; its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of
the whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin,
and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by
an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance.
Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. I
know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs from a
wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one side, instead of
the mutual tapering of both sides.
The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil,
formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough
elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as the
Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as
that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited
forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his
wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the
most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale contains
by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti,
in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance
found unalloyed in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly
fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending
forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming
in water. A large whale’s case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm,
though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and
dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing
what you can.
I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was coated
within, but in superlative richness that coating could not possibly have compared
with the silken pearl-colored membrane, like the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the
inner surface of the Sperm Whale’s case.
It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces
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the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since—as has been elsewhere
set forth—the head embraces one third of the whole length of the creature, then
setting that length down at eighty feet for a good sized whale, you have more than
twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down
against a ship’s side.
As in decapitating the whale, the operator’s instrument is brought close to the
spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti magazine; he has,
therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless, untimely stroke should invade
the sanctuary and wastingly let out its invaluable contents. It is this decapitated
end of the head, also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that
position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side,
make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.
Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and— in
this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale’s great
Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.

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Chapter LXXVIII
Cistern and Buckets

Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture,
runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part where it exactly
projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a light tackle called a whip,
consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing
this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the
rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on the deck. Then, hand-over-hand,
down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands on
the summit of the head. There—still high elevated above the rest of the company,
to whom he vivaciously cries— he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the good
people to prayers from the top of a tower. A short-handled sharp spade being sent
up to him, he diligently searches for the proper place to begin breaking into the
Tun. In this business he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old
house, sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this
cautious search is over, a stout ironbound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has
been attached to one end of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across
the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket
within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up a very long pole.
Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the
Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up
comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid’s pail of new milk. Carefully
lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand,
and quickly emptied into a large tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through
the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego
has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun,
until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.
Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way; several
tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a queer accident
happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian, was so heedless and
reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles
suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and
oozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating
his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden,
as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! poor Tashtego—
like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down
into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean
Moby-Dick 258

out of sight!
“Man overboard!” cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first came
to his senses. “Swing the bucket this way!” and putting one foot into it, so as the
better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip itself the hoisters ran him high
up to the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior
bottom. Meantime, there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw
the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as
if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor
Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which he
had sunk.
At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing the
whip—which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles— a sharp cracking
noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one of the two enormous
hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast vibration the enormous mass
sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg.
The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every
instant to be on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent
motions of the head.
“Come down, come down!” yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand
holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he would still
remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line, rammed down the bucket
into the now collapsed well, meaning that the buried harpooneer should grasp it,
and so be hoisted out.
“In heaven’s name, man,” cried Stubb, “are you ramming home a cartridge
there?—Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of
his head? Avast, will ye!”
“Stand clear of the tackle!” cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.
Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped
into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull
rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath,
as half swinging—now over the sailors’ heads, and now over the water—Daggoo,
through a thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles,
while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the
sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with
a boardingsword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the
bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived
to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye counted every
ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the diver
could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off
from the ship.
“Ha! ha!” cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch overhead;
and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue
waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.
“Both! both!—it is both!”-cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after,
Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching
the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought
to the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very
brisk.
Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly

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Moby-Dick 259

descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its
bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his
long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out our poor Tash by the head. He
averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing
that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;—he had thrust
back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon
the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way— head
foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected.
And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the
deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the
teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a
lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same course
with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.
I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header’s will be sure to seem
incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or
heard of some one’s falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom
happens, and with much less reason too than the Indian’s, considering the exceeding
slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale’s well.
But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the
tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part
about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity
than itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash
fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but
the dense tendinous wall of the well—a double welded, hammered substance, as I
have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in
it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the
present instance materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining
undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording
Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may
say. Yes, it was a running delivery, so it was.
Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perish-
ing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined,
hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the
whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an
Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such
exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died
embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and
sweetly perished there?

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Chapter LXXIX
The Prairie

To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this
is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken. Such
an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for Lavater to have scrutinized
the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and
manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater
not only treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces
of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the modifications of
expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed
to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings
than man. Therefore, though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application
of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I
achieve what I can.
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He
has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the
features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally controls their combined
expression; hence it would seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage,
must very largely affect the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening,
a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to
the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping without
the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove,
and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude,
all his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured
Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose
to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you
sail round his vast head in your jollyboat, your noble conceptions of him are never
insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which
so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle
on his throne.
In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to be had
of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect is sublime.
In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning.
In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a touch of the grand in it.
Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the elephant’s brow is majestic. Human
or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German
Emperors to their decrees. It signifies—“God: done this day by my hand.” But in
Moby-Dick 261

most creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine
land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare’s or
Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear,
eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you
seem to track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland
hunters track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high
and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that
gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more
forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point
precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face;
he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated
with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in
profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed its grandeur
does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal,
semi-crescentic depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in a man, is Lavater’s
mark of genius.
But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book,
spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular
to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds
me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he
would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile
of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue,
or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter
any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry
May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in
the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm
Whale shall lord it.
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no
Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiog-
nomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William
Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in
its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read
the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read
if it if you can.

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Chapter LXXX
The Nut

If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain

seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in length.
Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side view of a
moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base. But in life—as we
have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared
by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end
the skull forms a crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of
this crater—in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many
in depth reposes the mere handful of this monster’s brain. The brain is at least
twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away behind its vast
outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications of Quebec.
So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who
peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable
semblance of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange
folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping
with the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of
his intelligence.
It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature’s
living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true brain, you can then see no
indications of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a
false brow to the common world.
If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its rear
end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the human skull,
beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this
reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls,
and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions
on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This man had
no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with
the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to yourself
the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the most exalted
potency is.
But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale’s proper brain, you deem
it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea for you. If
you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the
Moby-Dick 263

resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing

rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the
vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance,
I take it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once
pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of
which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relieve, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now,
I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not pushing
their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that
much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather
feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet
upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of
that flag which I fling half out to the world.
Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is
continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal
canal will measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a triangular
figure with the base downwards. As it passes through the remaining vertebrae the
canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now,
of course, this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance—the
spinal cord—as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And what
is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain’s cavity, the spinal cord
remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain. Under all these
circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map out the whale’s spine
phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of
his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude
of his spinal cord.
But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would merely
assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the Sperm Whale’s hump.
This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the larger vertebrae, and is,
therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it. From its relative situation
then, I should call this high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the
Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason
to know.

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Chapter LXXXI
The Pequod Meets The Virgin

The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship

Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of Bremen.
At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and Germans
are now among the least; but here and there at very wide intervals of latitude and
longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in the Pacific.
For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects. While yet
some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a boat, her captain
was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the bows instead of the stern.
“What has he in his hand there?” cried Starbuck, pointing to something wavingly
held by the German. “Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!”
“Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s coming off to
make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don’t you see that big tin can there alongside of
him?—that’s his boiling water. Oh! he’s all right, is the Yarman.”
“Go along with you,” cried Flask, “it’s a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He’s out of
oil, and has come a-begging.”
However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the whale-
ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old proverb about
carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing really happens; and in
the present case Captain Derick De Deer did indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as
Flask did declare.
As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding
what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his
complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the conversation to
his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into his
hammock at night in profound darkness—his last drop of Bremen oil being gone,
and not a single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding by
hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically called a clean
one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin.
His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship’s
side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both
vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-
can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan
lamp-feeders.
Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats
that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod’s keels. There were
Moby-Dick 265

eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were going all abreast
with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many
spans of horses in harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though continually
unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea.
Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped old
bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as by the unusual yellowish
incrustations over-growing him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or some other
infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed questionable;
for it is not customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless,
he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him,
because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell
formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious;
coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed
by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his
other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.
“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has the stomach-ache, I’m afraid.
Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding mad
Christmas in him, boys. It’s the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but
look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he’s lost his tiller.”
As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load
of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this old
whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous
rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his
starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it
were hard to say.
“Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll give ye a sling for that wounded arm,” cried
cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.
“Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” cried Starbuck. “Give way, or the German will
have him.”
With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one fish,
because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most valuable whale, but
he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going with such great velocity,
moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this juncture, the Pequod’s keels
had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had
had, Derick’s boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his foreign
rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already so nigh to his mark,
he would be enabled to dart his iron before they could completely overtake and
pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite confident that this would be the case, and
occasionally with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.
“The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” cried Starbuck; “he mocks and dares me
with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!”— Then in his old
intense whisper—“give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!”
“I tell ye what it is, men”—cried Stubb to his crew—It’s against my religion to get
mad; but I’d like to eat that villainous Yarman—Pull— won’t ye? Are ye going to
let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best
man. Come, why don’t some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who’s that been dropping an
anchor overboard— we don’t budge an inch—we’re becalmed. Halloo, here’s grass
growing in the boat’s bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there’s budding. This won’t
do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit fire or

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not?”
“Oh! see the suds he makes!” cried Flask, dancing up and down—“What a
hump—Oh, do pile on the beef—lays like a log! Oh! my lads, do spring—slap-jacks
and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads— baked clams and muffins—oh, do, do,
spring,—he’s a hundred barreler— don’t lose him now—don’t oh, don’t!—see that
Yarman—Oh, won’t ye pull for your duff, my lads—such a sog! such a sogger! Don’t
ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a whole bank!
The bank of England!—Oh, do, do, do!—What’s that Yarman about now?”
At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the advancing
boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view of retarding his rivals’ way,
and at the same time economically accelerating his own by the momentary impetus
of the backward toss.
“The unmannerly Dutch dogger!” cried Stubb. “Pull now, men, like fifty thousand
line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d’ye say, Tashtego; are you the
man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces for the honor of old Gayhead?
What d’ye say?”
“I say, pull like god-dam,”—cried the Indian.
Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod’s three boats
now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed, momentarily neared him. In
that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of the headsman when drawing near to his prey,
the three mates stood up proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an
exhilarating cry of, “There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down
with the Yarman! Sail over him!”
But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all their gallantry,
he would have proved the victor in this race, had not a righteous judgment de-
scended upon him in a crab which caught the blade of his midship oarsman. While
this clumsy lubber was striving to free his white-ash, and while, in consequence,
Derick’s boat was nigh to capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty
rage;—that was a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they
took a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German’s quarter. An
instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale’s immediate wake,
while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made.
It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now going
head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet; while his
one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he
yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically
sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I
seen a bird with clipped wing, making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly
striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive
cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was
chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration
through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while
still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to
appal the stoutest man who so pitied.
Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod’s boats the
advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what
to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would for
ever escape.
But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three tigers—Queequeg,

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Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to their feet, and standing in a diagonal

row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and darted over the head of the German
harpooneer, their three Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of
foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s headlong
rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled
harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels.
“Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon
them as he shot by; “ye’ll be picked up presently— all right—I saw some sharks
astern—St. Bernard’s dogs, you know— relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this
is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah!—Here we go like three
tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an
elephant in a tilbury on a plain— makes the wheelspokes fly, boys, when you fasten
to him that way; and there’s danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a hill.
Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he’s going to Davy Jones—all a rush
down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!”
But the monster’s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously
sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such
a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the harpooneers
that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexter-
ous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at
last—owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the boats,
whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—the gunwales of the
bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the
air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that
attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish.
But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this “holding
on,” as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from the
back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the
sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted
whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the
longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because,
owing to the enormous surface of him— in a full grown sperm whale something
less than 2000 square feet— the pressure of the water is immense. We all know
what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here,
above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back
a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty
atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle
ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.
As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its
eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a
ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that
beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing
and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at
the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan
was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what?
To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly
said—“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The
sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon:
he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as

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stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature? this he? Oh!
that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand
thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to
hide him from the Pequod’s fishspears!
In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down
beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half
Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been
such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated in
the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires, the life and
death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat. The next
moment, relieved in a great part from the downward strain at the bows, the boats
gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white
bears are scared from it into the sea.
“Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.”
The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand’s breadth could have
been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the boats, and
soon the whale broke water within two ship’s length of the hunters.
His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals there
are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the
blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with
the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is, to have an entire non-valvular structure
of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon,
a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is
heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the
surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the
quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he
will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought
a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and indiscernible hills.
Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his
swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady
jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural
spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted
moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of
him had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was untouched.
As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form,
with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or
rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown
masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the
points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly
pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his
blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals
and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that
preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last
he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a
bushel, low down on the flank.
“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”
“Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no need of that!”
But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet

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shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish,
the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft,
bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing
Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so
spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had
made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over
and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his
belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when
by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and
with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the
ground— so the last long dying spout of the whale.
Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed
symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by Starbuck’s
orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so that ere long every boat was a
buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords.
By very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred
to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was
plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom.
It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire
length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of
the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in
the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them,
and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs
have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the
ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone
being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it.
Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some
Nor’ West Indian long before America was discovered.
What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet
there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by the ship’s
being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea, owing to the body’s im-
mensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck, who had the ordering
of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when
at length the ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms
with the body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such
was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and
cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything
in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking
up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the
ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the
unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon
the immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low
had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached,
while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk,
and the ship seemed on the point of going over.
“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t be in such a devil of a
hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying
there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a
pen-knife, and cut the big chains.”

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“Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s heavy hatchet, he
leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains.
But a few strokes, full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the
rest. With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase
sank.
Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a
very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it. Usually
the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably
elevated above the surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre,
and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones
heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is
caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this
absence of buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest
health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush
and May of life, with all their panting lard about them! even these brawny, buoyant
heroes do sometimes sink.
Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this accident than
any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do. This
difference in the species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater
quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing
more than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there
are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken
whale again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious.
Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort
of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In the
Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale
gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when
the body has gone down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended
again.
It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the
Pequod’s mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats;
though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of
uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless,
the Fin-Back’s spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale’s, that by unskilful fishermen
it is often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in
valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her
four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful
chase.
Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.

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Chapter LXXXII
The Honor and Glory of Whaling

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very
spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and
antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets
of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported
with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned
a fraternity.
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal
honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood
was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our pro-
fession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s
lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the
lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as
Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen,
intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid.
It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the
present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no
man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,
in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale,
which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of
the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was
carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important
in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some supposed to
be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon;
which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales
and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. “Thou
art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea,” said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly
meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides,
it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered
a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the
deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have
the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.
Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature
encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like
Moby-Dick 272

shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet
considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was
unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale
might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal
ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all
this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and
the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than
the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth,
this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon
by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s head and both
the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him
remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary
guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be
enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of
that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a
whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since
even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St.
George’s decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained
dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique Crockett
and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down
and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman of him,
that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his
fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of
involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I
claim him for one of our clan.
But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and
the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of
Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the
demigod then, why not the prophet?
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of
our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we
find the head-waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves.
That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives
us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives
us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten
earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma,
or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its
periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the
Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to
Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained
something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying
at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding
down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this
Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?
Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you!
What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?

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Chapter LXXXIII
Jonah Historically Regarded

Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding
chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and
the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing
out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules
and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions
did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story
was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious,
unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah’s whale with two spouts in his
head—a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right
Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this
saying, “A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very small. But, to this,
Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop,
that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale’s belly, but as temporarily lodged in
some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For
truly, the Right Whale’s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and
comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself
in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.
Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want
of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to
his incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric juices. But this objection likewise
falls to the ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have
taken refuge in the floating body of a dead whale— even as the French soldiers in
the Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.
Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah
was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to
another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add,
possibly called “The Whale,” as some craft are nowadays christened the “Shark,” the
“Gull,” the “Eagle.” Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined
that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an
inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved
from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But
he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right:
Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days’
he was vomited up somewhere within three days’ journey of Nineveh, a city on the
Moby-Dick 274

Tigris, very much more than three days’ journey across from the nearest point of
the Mediterranean coast. How is that?
But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that short
distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the way of the
Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through the whole length of
the Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a
supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days,
not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any
whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah’s weathering the Cape of Good Hope
at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that great headland from
Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make modern history a liar.
But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish pride
of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing that he had but little
learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea. I say it only
shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the
reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah’s going
to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the
general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks
devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries ago, an
English traveller in old Harris’s Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honor
of Jonah, in which Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.

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Chapter LXXXIV
Pitchpoling

To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed; and for
much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation upon their
boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can
do no harm, it may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil
and water are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat, and
one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, took more than
customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it hung over
the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure
a crop of hair from the craft’s bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to
some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.
Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them,
they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra’s
barges from Actium.
Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great exertion,
Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale, without
at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added fleetness. Such
unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or later inevitably
extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him.
But to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious.
What then remained?
Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless
subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed that fine
manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad sword, in all its
exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only indispensable with an inveterate running
whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance
is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme headway.
Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve feet in length; the
staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a lighter material—pine.
It is furnished with a small rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it
can be hauled back to the hand after darting.
But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though the harpoon
may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom done; and when
done, is still less frequently successful, on account of the greater weight and inferior
length of the harpoon as compared with the lance, which in effect become serious
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drawbacks. As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before
any pitchpoling comes into play.
Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in pitchpoling.
Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy
foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing
twice or thrice along its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly
gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his grasp,
leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before his waistband’s
middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily depresses
the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly
balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler,
balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in
a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the
life spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
“That drove the spigot out of him!” cried Stubb. “‘Tis July’s immortal Fourth; all
fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio,
or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I’d have ye hold a canakin to
the jet, and we’d drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in
the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the living
stuff.”
Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated, the spear
returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash. The agonized whale
goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern,
folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die.

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Chapter LXXXV
The Fountain

That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of ages be-
fore—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling
and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying
pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been
close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings—
that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a
quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851),
it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water,
or nothing but vapor—this is surely a noteworthy thing.
Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent.
Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in
general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in which
they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never once raise its
head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives
him regular lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by inhaling the
disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodical
visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth,
for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale’s mouth is buried at least eight feet
beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with
his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his
head.
If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function indispensable to vitality,
inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a certain element, which being subsequently
brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do
not think I shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.
Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be aerated with one
breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not fetch another for a considerable
time. That is to say, he would then live without breathing. Anomalous as it may
seem, this is precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals,
his full hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or
so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills.
How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine he is supplied with a
remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when
he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an
hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality
Moby-Dick 278

in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of
drink for future use in its four supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this
labyrinth is indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable
and true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable
obstinacy of that leviathan in having his spoutings out, as the fishermen phrase
it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the Sperm
Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with all his other
unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is,
respires seventy breaths; then whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have his
seventy breaths over again, to a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you
alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good
his regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he
finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however, that in different
individuals these rates are different; but in any one they are alike. Now, why should
the whale thus insist upon having his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his
reservoir of air, ere descending for good? How obvious it is it, too, that this necessity
for the whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by
hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand fathoms
beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities
that strike the victory to thee!
In man, breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving for two or
three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or
sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about
one seventh or Sunday of his time.
It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if it could
truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then I opine we should
be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for
the only thing about him that at all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole;
and being so clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power
of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water or whether
it be vapor—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it is,
nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what does he
want of them? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.
Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal,
and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal— is furnished with a sort of locks
(that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of
water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when
he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the
whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to
this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh!
happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the
conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the
upper surface of his head, and a little to one side; this curious canal is very much
like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns
whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of
the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled
breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and discharged through the
spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting

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canal; but it cannot be proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water
through the spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be,
when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale’s food is far
beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you
regard him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that when
unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and the
ordinary periods of respiration.
But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have
seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My
dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found
your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost
stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.
The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and
how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always, when you
are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his spout, he is in a prodigious
commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at such times you should
think that you really perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know
that they are not merely condensed from its vapor; or how do you know that they
are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which
is countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head? For even when tranquilly
swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as
a dromedary’s in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of
water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock
filled up with rain.
Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the precise
nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering into it, and putting
his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to this fountain and fill it, and bring
it away. For even when coming into slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of
the jet, which will often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness
of the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with
the spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say,
the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout
is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I
do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you.
The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly
spout alone.
Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is
this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion
I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity
of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is
an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other
whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that
from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil,
Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while
in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I
had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a
curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The
invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot
tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument

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Moby-Dick 280

for the above supposition.

And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him
solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by
a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that
vapor— as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had
put its seal upon his thoughts. For d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they
only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.
And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials,
few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions
of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but
makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.

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Chapter LXXXVI
The Tail

Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely
plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail.
Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point of the trunk
where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone,
an area of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root expands
into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than
an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then
sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In no
living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic
borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail
will considerably exceed twenty feet across.
The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into it,
and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper, middle, and lower. The
fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long and horizontal; those of the middle
one, very short, and running crosswise between the outside layers. This triune
structure, as much as anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old
Roman walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of
tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique, and
which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry.
But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the whole
bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and
filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down into the flukes,
insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail
the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.
Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.
Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion
of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power.
On the contrary, those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it. Real
strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything
imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied
tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its
charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the naked
corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that
seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in
human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of
Moby-Dick 282

the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in
which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute
as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative,
feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form
the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.
Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether wielded in sport,
or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it be in, its flexions are invariably
marked by exceeding grace. Therein no fairy’s arm can transcend it.
Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for progression;
Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing;
Fifth, in peaking flukes.
First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a different
manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man or fish,
wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the whale his tail is the sole means of propulsion.
Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards,
it is this which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when
furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights another
sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts with man, he
chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In striking at a boat, he swiftly curves
away his flukes from it, and the blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in
the unobstructed air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply
irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in
eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing
to the light buoyancy of the whale-boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked
rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most serious
result. These submerged side blows are so often received in the fishery, that they
are accounted mere child’s play. Some one strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped.
Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense
of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only
equalled by the daintiness of the elephant’s trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced
in the action of sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain
soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the
sea; and if he feel but a sailor’s whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all. What
tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any prehensile power,
I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes’ elephant that so frequented the
flower-market, and with low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then
caressed their zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not
possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant,
that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart.
Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle
of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and
kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see his power
in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted high into the air! then smiting the
surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a
great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapor from
the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was the smoke from
the touch-hole.
Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lies consider-

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ably below the level of his back, they are then completely out of sight beneath the
surface; but when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least
thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment,
till they downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime breach— somewhere
else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest
sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the
gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams,
have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the
flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are
in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels.
Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and
sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and
for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the
time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even
in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the
African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout
of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often
hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.
The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant, so
far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the other are concerned,
should not tend to place those two opposite organs on an equality, much less the
creatures to which they respectively belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a
terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the stalk of
a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant’s trunk were as the playful tap of a
fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale’s ponderous
flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the other hurled entire boats
with all their oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his
balls.*
Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and the
elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant stands in
much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant; nevertheless,
there are not wanting some points of curious similitude; among these is the spout.
It is well known that the elephant will often draw up water or dust in his trunk,
and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream.
The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express
it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of
man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally,
are these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them
akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods
intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of
the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most
experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep. I know him
not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand
his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt
see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I
cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I
say again he has no face.

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Chapter LXXXVII
The Great Armada

The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from the
territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In a continuous
line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor;
which, with many others, form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting
Asia with Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly
studded oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for
the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of
Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from
the west, emerge into the China seas.
Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway
in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green promontory, known to
seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond to the central gateway opening
into some vast walled empire: and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices,
and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of
that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such
treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance,
however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The
shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses
which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis.
Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered
top-sails from the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries
past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra and Java,
freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a
ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute.
Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded
coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through
the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by the
repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the hands of European cruisers,
the audacity of these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the
present day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in those
waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits; Ahab
purposing to pass through them into the Java sea, and thence, cruising northwards,
over waters known to be frequented here and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep
inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the
Moby-Dick 285

great whaling season there. By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would
sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous
to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else
foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he
was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be
presumed to be haunting it.
But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink
air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circus-running
sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what’s in himself.
So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with
alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship
carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a
whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not
altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years’ water in her.
Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer,
in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in
casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may
have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the
whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew
having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry
them the news that another flood had come; they would only answer—“Well, boys,
here’s the ark!”
Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in
the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground, roundabout,
was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for cruising; therefore,
as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly
hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs
of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils the
fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was descried. Almost
renouncing all thought of falling in with any game hereabouts, the ship had well
nigh entered the straits, when the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft,
and ere long a spectacle of singular magnificence saluted us.
But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which of
late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of
almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in former times, are now
frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude,
that it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league
and covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm
Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even
in the best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months
together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by
what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.
Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming
a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of
whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the straight
perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, falls over in two
branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting
spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually
rising and falling away to leeward.

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Seen from the Pequod’s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the sea,
this host of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a
blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of
some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman
on a height.
As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate
their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and once
more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of
whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits; gradually contracting the
wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.
Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling their
weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats. If the
wind only held, little doubt had they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda,
the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not
a few of their number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan,
Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped white-
elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with stun-sail piled on
stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans before us; when, of a sudden, the
voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly directing attention to something in our wake.
Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear. It
seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and falling something like the
spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and go; for they constantly
hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly
revolved in his pivot-hole, crying, “Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the
sails;—Malays, sir, and after us!”
As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly have
entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit, to make up for
their over-cautious delay. But when the swift Pequod, with a fresh leading wind,
was herself in hot chase; how very kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in
speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit,— mere riding-whips and rowels to her,
that they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his
forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty
pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he glanced
upon the green walls of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and
bethought him that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld,
how that through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his
deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman
atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses;—when all these
conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like
the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being
able to drag the firm thing from its place.
But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when, after
steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at last shot by the
vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the broad
waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales
had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously
gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length
they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them; and the wind now
dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by

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some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three
keels that were after them,— though as yet a mile in their rear,—than they rallied
again, and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like
flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.
Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and after several
hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase, when a general pausing
commotion among the whales gave animating tokens that they were now at last
under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the
fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is gallied*. The compact martial
columns in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now
broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus’ elephants in the Indian
battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions
expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by
their short thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This
was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed
as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the sea. Had
these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by
three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But
this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though
banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have
fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded
together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire,
rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly
dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the
strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth
which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
* To gally, or gallow, is to frighten excessively— to confound with fright. It is an
old Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakespeare:—
The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make them keep
their caves.
To common language, the word is now completely obsolete. When the polite
landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set it down as one
of the whaleman’s self-derived savageries. Much the same is it with many other
sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to New-England rocks with the
noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth. Thus,
some of the best and furthest-descended English words—the etymological Howards
and Percys—are now democratised, nay, plebeianised—so to speak— in the New
World.
Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is to
be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor retreated, but collectively
remained in one place. As is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated,
each making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three
minutes’ time, Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding
spray in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight for the
heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under
such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more
or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the
fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal,
you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.

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As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed
to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white
gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro
rushing about us; our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest,
and striving to steer through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not
at what moment it may be locked in and crushed.
But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from this
monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from that, whose
colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in
the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by
short darts, for there was no time to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite
idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly
attended to the shouting part of the business. “Out of the way, Commodore!” cried
one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an
instant threatened to swamp us. “Hard down with your tail, there!” cried a second
to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with his own
fan-like extremity.
All whale-boats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by the
Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of equal size are
stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each other’s grain at right angles; a line
of considerable length is then attached to the middle of this block, and the other end
of the line being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly
among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales are close round
you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm whales are not every day
encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you cannot
kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at
your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these the drug, comes into requisition.
Our boat was furnished with three of them. The first and second were successfully
darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous
sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with
the chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the
clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an instant
tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the boat’s bottom as the
seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but
we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for the time.
It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it not that
as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly diminished; moreover, that as
we went still further and further from the circumference of commotion, the direful
disorders seemed waning. So that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and
the towing whale sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting
momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as
if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms
in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this
central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek,
produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods.
Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every
commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the outer
concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly
going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely

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shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the
middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the
crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the
herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a
breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in
order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited
by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.
Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer circles,
and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of those circles, the
entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude, must have contained
at least two or three square miles. At any rate—though indeed such a test at such
a time might be deceptive—spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that
seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this circumstance,
because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost
fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning
the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and
every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller
whales— now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake—
evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic
which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffling
round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that
some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads;
Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for
the time refrained from darting it.
But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger
world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults,
floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their
enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to
a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling
will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives
at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting
upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem
looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their
new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.
One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old,
might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He
was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that
irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to
head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s
bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the
plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.
“Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him fast!—Who
line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one little!”
“What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck.
“Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down.
As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms
of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling
line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils
of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still

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tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural
line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that
the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged
to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.*
The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most
other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably
be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few
known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for
in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the
breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts
in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and
blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has
been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with
mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum.
And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights,
did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all
peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so,
amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport
in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep
down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in
the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drugging the
whales on the frontier of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within the first
circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded them.
But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and
fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is sometimes the
custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to
hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It
is done by darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for
hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but
not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with
him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was
now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado Arnold,
at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went.
But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough,
any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of the
herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance obscured from us.
But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery,
this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also
run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached
to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his
tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented
to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his
flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his
own comrades.
This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary fright.
First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a little, and tumble
against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself
began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries

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vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central
circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A
low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of
block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales
came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common
mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the
stern.
“Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—“gripe your oars, and
clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off, you Queequeg—the
whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand up—stand up, and stay so! Spring
men—pull, men; never mind their backs—scrape them!—scrape away!”
The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a narrow
Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor we at last shot
into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly
watching for another outlet. After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last
swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed
by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was
cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in the bows
to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy
made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.
Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved
itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped together at last
in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness.
Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up
what drugged whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which
Flask had killed and waited. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are
carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted
upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea,
and also as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.
The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying
in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales only one
was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken, as will
hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.

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Chapter LXXXVIII
Schools and Schoolmasters

The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales,
and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations.
Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must have been
seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are occasionally observed,
embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such bands are known as schools.
They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost entirely of females, and
those mustering none but young vigorous males, or bulls as they are familiarly
designated.
In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of
full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by
falling in the rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman
is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly
accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem. The contrast between
this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the
largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more than
one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are comparatively delicate,
indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it
cannot be denied, that upon the whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point.
It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings.
Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety. You
meet them on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial feeding season,
having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in the Northern seas,
and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they
have lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for
the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other
excessive temperature of the year.
When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious
sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family. Should
any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw confi-
dentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails
him, and chases him away! High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like
him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what
the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed; for
alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible
duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to
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deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with their long lower jaws, sometimes
locking them together, and so striving for the supremacy like elks that warringly
interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these
encounters,— furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances,
wrenched and dislocated mouths.
But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the first
rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to watch that lord. Gently
he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there awhile, still in
tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping
among his thousand concubines. Granting other whales to be in sight, the fisherman
will seldom give chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too
lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the sons
and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must take care of
themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous
roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery,
however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous
babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the
ardor of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn
pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease
and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent,
repentant, admonitory stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an
exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels
saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.
Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord
and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It is therefore not
in strict character, however admirably satirical, that after going to school himself,
he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it.
His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed
upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled
this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed
himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his
younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into
some of his pupils.
The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes
himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost universally,
a lone whale— as a solitary Leviathan is called—proves an ancient one. Like
venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature
herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives
she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.
The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously mentioned,
offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those female whales are
characteristically timid, the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are
by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous
to encounter; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes
met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.
The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob
of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round
the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would
insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon

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relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up,
and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.
Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still more
characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all his
comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her companions
swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and
so long, as themselves to fall a prey.

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Chapter LXXXIX
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

The allusion to the waifs and waif-poles in the last chapter but one, necessitates
some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may
be deemed the grand symbol and badge.
It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a whale
may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by
another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised many minor contingencies, all
partaking of this one grand feature. For example,—after a weary and perilous chase
and capture of a whale, the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent
storm; and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a
calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious
and violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some
written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases.
Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was
that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no
other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen
have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a
system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the
By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People’s
Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne’s farthing, or the
barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.
I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of
it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.
First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is
connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the
occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a
strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears
a waif, or any other recognized symbol of possession; so long as the party wailing it
plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention
so to do.
These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks— the Coke-upon-
Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and honorable whalemen
allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an outrageous
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moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale previously chased or
killed by another party. But others are by no means so scrupulous.
Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in England,
wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a whale in the Northern
seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had succeeded in harpooning the fish;
they were at last, through peril of their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines,
but their boat itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came
up with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the
very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were remonstrated with,
their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs’ teeth, and assured them that by
way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now retain their line, harpoons,
and boat, which had remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure.
Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line,
harpoons, and boat.
Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge.
In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his position, by
alluding to a recent crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to
bridle his wife’s viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but
in the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to recover
possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then supported it by saying,
that though the gentleman had originally harpooned the lady, and had once had
her fast, and only by reason of the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at
last abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and
therefore when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became
that subsequent gentleman’s property, along with whatever harpoon might have
been found sticking in her.
Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale and
the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.
These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very learned
Judge in set terms decided, to wit,— That as for the boat, he awarded it to the
plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save their lives; but that
with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged to the
defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture;
and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish)
acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards took the
fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took the fish; ergo, the
aforesaid articles were theirs.
A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might possibly
object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter, the two great
principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously quoted, and applied and
elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited case; these two laws touching
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all
human jurisprudence; For notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the
Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on.
Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is,
regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole
of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves
but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious
landlord is the widow’s last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain’s

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marble mansion with a doorplate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is
the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from the poor Woebegone,
the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from starvation; what is that
ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of
100,000 pounds seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of
broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul’s help) what is
that globular 100,000 but a Fast-Fish. What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary
towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is
poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is
Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the
law?
But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred
doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally
applicable.
What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the
Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was
Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at
last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What
all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious
belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists
are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a
Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

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Chapter XC
Heads or Tails

“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.”

BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.
Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the context,
means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King,
as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully
presented with the tail. A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an
apple; there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form,
is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange
anomaly touching the general law of Fast—and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a
separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the English railways
to be at the expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the accommodation of
royalty. In the first place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law
is still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance-that happened within the
last two years.
It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the
Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale
which they had originally descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports
are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle,
called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the
royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment
his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord
Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly
by virtue of that same fobbing of them.
Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their trowsers
rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat fish high and dry,
promising themselves a good 150 pounds from the precious oil and bone; and in
fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon the
strength of their respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian and
charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon
the whale’s head, he says—“Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize
it as the Lord Warden’s.” Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consterna-
tion—so truly English— knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their
heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the stranger. But
that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard heart of the learned
gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching
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about for his ideas, made bold to speak,

“Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”
“The Duke.”
“But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”
“It is his.”
“We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all that to go
to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains but our blisters?”
“It is his.”
“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a
livelihood?”
“It is his.”
“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this whale.”
“It is his.”
“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”
“It is his.”
In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington
received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular lights, the case might
by a bare possibility in some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a
rather hard one, an honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note
to his Grace, begging him to take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full
consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were
published) that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be
obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman)
would decline meddling with other people’s business. Is this the still militant old
man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of
beggars?
It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the whale
was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then on what
principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that right. The law itself has
already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the
whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen, “because of its superior excellence.”
And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in
such matters.
But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail?
A reason for that, ye lawyers!
In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pin-money, an old King’s Bench author,
one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that ye Queen’s
wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this was written at a time
when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in
ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a
sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be
presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers— the whale and the
sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying
the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author
has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must
be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and
elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be

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humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a
reason in all things, even in law.

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Chapter XCI
The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud

“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable
fetor denying not inquiry.” SIR T. BROWNE, V. E.
It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we
were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the
Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A
peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.
“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are some of
those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they would keel up before
long.”
Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship,
whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we
glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak; and by the eddying
cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was
plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that
is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated
corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale;
worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to
bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity
could persuade them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do
it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very
inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.
Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a
second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than
the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that seem
to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their
defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the
proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at
such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general.
The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recog-
nized his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail
of one of these whales.
“There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship’s
bows, “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but
poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking
them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with their
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hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the
oil they will get won’t be enough to dip the Captain’s wick into; aye, we all know
these things; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the
drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the dry bones
of that other precious fish he has there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some
one, and let’s make him a present of a little oil for dear charity’s sake. For what
oil he’ll get from that drugged whale there, wouldn’t be fit to burn in a jail; no, not
in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I’ll agree to get more oil
by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he’ll get from that
bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a
good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of
that. It’s worth trying. Yes, I’m for it;” and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.
By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the
Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by
its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat’s crew, and
pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance
with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the
likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper
spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical
folded bulb of a bright red color. Upon her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read
“Bouton de Rose,”—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of
this aromatic ship.
Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word
rose, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the whole to
him.
“A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that will do very
well; but how like all creation it smells!”
Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had to
pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale;
and so talk over it.
Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled—“Bouton-de-
Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?”
“Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the
chief-mate.
“Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?”
“What whale?”
“The White Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
“Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no.”
“Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.”
Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over
the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands into a trumpet
and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the
Frenchman.
He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains, and
was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag.
“What’s the matter with your nose, there?” said Stubb. “Broke it?”
“I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all!” answered the
Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much. “But what
are you holding yours for?”

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“Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on.

Fine day, ain’t it? Air rather gardenny, I should say;
throw us a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?”
“What in the devil’s name do you want here?” roared the Guernseyman, flying
into a sudden passion.
“Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that’s the word! why don’t you pack those whales in
ice while you’re working at ’em? But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud,
that it’s all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales? As for that dried up
one, there, he hasn’t a gill in his whole carcase.”
“I know that well enough; but, d’ye see, the Captain here won’t believe it; this
is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But come aboard, and
mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t me; and so I’ll get out of this dirty scrape.”
“Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined Stubb, and with
that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented itself. The sailors,
in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the heavy tackles in readiness for
the whales. But they worked rather slow and talked very fast, and seemed in
anything but a good humor. All their noses upwardly projected from their faces like
so many jibbooms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up
to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague,
dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having
broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing
tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories.
Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the
Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face thrust
from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the tormented
surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had
betaken himself to the Captain’s round-house (cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest;
but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.
Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the Guernsey-
man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate expressed his
detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had brought them all
into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him carefully, Stubb further
perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the slightest suspicion concerning the
ambergris. He therefore held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank
and confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan for both
circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting
their sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover
of an interpreter’s office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from
Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost
in him during the interview.
By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small and
dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and
moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side.
To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at
once ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them.
“What shall I say to him first?” said he.
“Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, “you may
as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me, though I don’t
pretend to be a judge.”

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“He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain,
“that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with
six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought
alongside.”
Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
“What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
“Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I’m
quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey.
In fact, tell him from me he’s a baboon.”
“He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far more
deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we value our lives,
to cut loose from these fish.”
Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to
desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains
confining the whales to the ship.
“What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them.
“Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in fact, tell him
I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody else.”
“He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any service to us.”
Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties (meaning
himself and mate), and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his cabin to drink a
bottle of Bordeaux.
“He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the interpreter.
“Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to drink with the
man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”
“He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking; but that if
Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had best drop all four
boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for it’s so calm they won’t drift.”
By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed the
Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his boat, he would do
what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the
ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship
one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously
slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.
Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting
his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in
between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating
body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded
to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he
commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost
have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade
struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery
buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew were all in high excitement, eagerly
helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.
And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming,
and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed,
especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart
of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide
of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along

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with another, without at all blending with it for a time.

“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subter-
ranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”
Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something
that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and
savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between
yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an
ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably
lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for
impatient Ahab’s loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship
would bid them good-bye.

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Chapter XCII
Ambergris

Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of

commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at
the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and
indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained,
like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the
French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For
amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland
soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a
hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for
beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy,
that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and
pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same
purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants
drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale them-
selves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is.
By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the
dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by
administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of
harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.
I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain hard,
round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors’ trousers buttons;
but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing, more than pieces of small squid
bones embalmed in that manner.
Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in
the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in
Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor,
but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what
it is that maketh the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of
ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.
I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing
to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen, and which, in
the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly
substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman’s two whales. Elsewhere
in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of
Moby-Dick 307

whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to

rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma
originate?
I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling
ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not
then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always
done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung
holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season
in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed,
forbidding any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold,
and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is
given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old city graveyard,
for the foundations of a Lying-in Hospital.
I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be likewise
imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch
village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used by
the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells, a text-book on that subject.
As its name imports (smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to
afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being
taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles,
and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth no
very pleasant savor. But all this is quite different from a South Sea Sperm Whaler;
which in a voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil,
does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the state
that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or dead, if but
decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can
whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew
in the company, by the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than
fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of
exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that
the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a
musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken the
Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that
famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out
of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great?

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Chapter XCIII
The Castaway

It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant
event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew; an event most lamentable;
and which ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft
with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might
prove her own.
Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few hands
are reserved called shipkeepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the
boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these shipkeepers are as hardy
fellows as the men comprising the boats’ crews. But if there happen to be an unduly
slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made
a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name,
Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his
tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color, driven in one eccentric
span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects,
Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant,
genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays
and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year’s
calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and
New Year’s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant,
for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king’s
cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-
striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had
most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus
temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by
strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre
with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many
a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had
turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear
air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop
will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in
its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up,
not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences,
infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the
Moby-Dick 309

crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to
the story.
It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman chanced so to
sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was
put into his place.
The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but
happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and therefore came off
not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing him, took care, afterwards, to
exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it
needful.
Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the fish
received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened, in this instance,
to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The involuntary consternation of the moment
caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of
the slack whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so
as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant
the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto!
poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there
by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and neck.
Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated Pip
for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended its sharp
edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, “Cut?”
Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face plainly looked, Do, for God’s sake! All passed in a
flash. In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.
“Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved.
So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by yells
and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to
evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner,
cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice.
The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the rest was
indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your
true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat,
is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted
conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin to jump in
for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory
command “Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump;
mind that. We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell
for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t
jump any more.” Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved
his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes
with his benevolence.
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under
very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast
out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the
sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It
was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day! the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly
stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out
to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like
a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb’s

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Moby-Dick 310

inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes,
a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre
of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely
castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.
Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised
swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is
intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless
immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe
in the open sea— mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her
sides.
But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did
not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed,
no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up;
though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their
own timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and
such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so
called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and
armies.
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales
close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so
far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon
began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last
rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such,
at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned
the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive
to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided
to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his
hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw
the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of
waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom,
and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is
heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that
celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels
then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
For the rest blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery;
and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell
myself.

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Chapter XCIV
A Squeeze of the Hand

That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod’s side,
where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly
gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging
away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time
arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of
which anon.
It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others,
I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted
into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to
squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in
old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener!
such a softener; such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few
minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at
the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so
serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated
tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and
discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up
that uncontaminated aroma,— literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I
declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our
horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I
almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue
in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all
ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I
myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity
came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in
it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate,
friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to
say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities,
or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay,
let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally
into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Moby-Dick 312

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many
prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must
eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it
anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table,
the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready
to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Now, while discoursing of sperm it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in
the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.
First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of
the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed
tendons—a wad of muscle—but still contains some oil. After being severed from
the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer.
They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.
Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale’s
flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a
considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful
object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with
a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson
and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to
keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it.
It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le
Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the
venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually
fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course
of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is
called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the
nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found
in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold
it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.
Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes
incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous sub-
stance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of
which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.
Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s vocabulary. But as
applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s nipper is a short firm strip of
tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan’s tail: it averages an inch
in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise
moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless
blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.
But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend
into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has
previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and
hoisted from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents,
this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit
by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally go
in pairs,—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is similar to a
frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook.

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Moby-Dick 313

With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from
slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands
on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This
spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he
stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts
off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants’, would you be very much astonished?
Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.

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Chapter XCV
The Cassock

Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing
of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that
you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object,
which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not
the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged
lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise
you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer than a Kentuckian is tall,
nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg.
And an idol, indeed, it is; or rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as
that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping
which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for
an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the
First Book of Kings.
Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two
allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed
shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade
from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically
to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns
the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to
double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere
long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed
extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise
slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full
canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will
adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an oper-
ation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the
bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop,
fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a
conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric,
what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!*
* Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to the
mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible,
inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and
its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.
Chapter XCVI
The Try-Works

Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her

try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with
oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It is as if from the open field a
brick-kiln were transported to her planks.
The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most roomy
part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the
weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square,
and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry
is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides,
and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at
top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch
we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels’ capacity.
When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished
with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls. During the
night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil themselves
away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them—one man in each pot,
side by side— many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips.
It is a place also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand
try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was
first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding
along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely
the same time.
Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry of
that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the furnaces, directly
underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense
heat of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a
shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a
tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as
it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall.
And here let us go back for a moment.
It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were first started
on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.
“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works.” This
was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace
throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in
Moby-Dick 316

the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except
as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the
crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable
of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning
martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own
fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his
smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must
live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as
may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of
judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcass;
sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense.
But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth
from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the
famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to
some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote,
Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails,
bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front
of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers,
always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing
masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the
snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke
rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the
boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth
of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass.
This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed,
looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their
tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and
the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed
in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their
unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized
laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro,
in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks
and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and
dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness
of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth,
and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with
savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness
of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided
the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself,
I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The
continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in
fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to
that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing oc-
curred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of
something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against

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it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I
thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids
and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could
see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had
been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing
seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness.
Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was
not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark,
bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the
tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted
way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief
sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to
her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the
vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and
how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal
contingency of being brought by the lee!
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on
the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching
tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly.
To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils
in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the
glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed
Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs
beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth,
and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more
of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.
With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest
of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is
vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom
yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and
would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor
devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as
passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones,
and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of under-
standing shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead.”
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time
it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And
there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest
gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And
even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that
even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon
the plain, even though they soar.

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Chapter XCVII
The Lamp

Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle, where the
off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought
you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors.
There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness;
a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To
dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is
his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He
makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest
night the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.
See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often
but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at the tryworks, and replen-
ishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its
unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar,
or astral contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes
and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the
traveller on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game.
Chapter XCVIII
Stowing Down and Clearing Up

Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-
head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the
deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which
entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his
great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is
condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti,
oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;—but now it remains to conclude the
last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing—singing, if I may—the
romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down
into the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding
along beneath the surface :is before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel casks; and
while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea,
the enormous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes
perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-
handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many
hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper.
At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways
are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to their
final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed,
like a closet walled up.
In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all
the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil;
on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled;
great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has
besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the
entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.
But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this self-same
ship! and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you would all but swear
you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously neat commander.
The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the
reason why the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil.
Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily
made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging
to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently along the bulwarks,
Moby-Dick 320

and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is
brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in
use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and
placed upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all
tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and, simultaneous
industry of almost the entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty is
at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift
themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all
aglow as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.
Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously
discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think
of having hangings to the top; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of
the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were
little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and
bring us napkins!
But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying
out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture,
and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time,
when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing
straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled
their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry
vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very
sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial
sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally
bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it;
many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks,
are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another
whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is
man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted
from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary
patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean
tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is
spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s
old routine again.
Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand
years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian
coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to
splice a rope.

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Chapter XCIX
The Doubloon

Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking
regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of
other things requiring narration it has not been added how that sometimes in these
walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot,
and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted
before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass,
that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when
resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same riveted
glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of
nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.
But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted
by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time
beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance
might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things
are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the
cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of
gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of many
a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts and
the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness,
it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and
every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded
with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every
sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset last left it last. For it was set apart
and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in their sailor ways,
one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale’s talisman. Sometimes they
talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at last,
and whether he would ever live to spend it.
Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and tropic
token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s disks and stars, ecliptics,
horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so
that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing
glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.
It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of
these things. On its round border it bore the letters, Republica del Ecuador: Quito.
Moby-Dick 322

So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and
beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the
Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you
saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on
the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned
zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun
entering the equinoctial point at Libra.
Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing.
“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other
grand and lofty things; look here,— three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm
tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and
victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image
of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn
but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who
ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun
wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and
but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to
storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, ‘t is fit that man should live in pains and die
in pangs! So be it, then! Here’s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”
“No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must have left their
mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning against
the bulwarks. “The old man seems to read Belshazzar’s awful writing. I have never
marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between
three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom,
the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes,
the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our
glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we
would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin
speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me
falsely.”
“There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, “he’s been
twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I
should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a
piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer’s Hook, I’d not look
at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard
this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons
of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of
Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and
joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What then should there be in this doubloon of
the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa!
here’s signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome
calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls ditto. I’ll get the almanack;
and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try my hand
at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts
calendar. Here’s the book. Let’s see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he’s
always among ’em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are— here they go—all alive: Aries,
or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or the Twins.
Well; the sun he wheels among ’em. Aye, here on the coin he’s just crossing the

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Moby-Dick 323

threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the
fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and
facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That’s my small experience, so far as
the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch’s navigator, and Daboll’s arithmetic go.
Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant
in wonders! There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By Jove, I have it!
Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and
now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s
Aries, or the Ram— lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull— he
bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins— that is, Virtue and Vice;
we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and
here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path— he gives a few fierce
bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that’s our
first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the
Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about
that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear;
we are curing the wound, when whang comes the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or
the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here’s the
battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong
we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and
drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There’s a sermon
now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out
of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and
so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But
stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let’s hear
what he’ll have to say. There; he’s before it; he’ll out with something presently. So,
so; he’s beginning.”
“I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain
whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s all this staring been about? It is
worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred
and sixty cigars. I won’t smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s
nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ’em out.”
“Shall I call that Wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a foolish look
to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of wiseish look to it. But, avast;
here comes our old Manxman—the old hearse-driver, he must have been, that is,
before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on
the other side of the mast; why, there’s a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now
he’s back again; what does that mean? Hark! he’s muttering— voice like an old
worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!”
“If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun
stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, and know their marks; they
were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what
sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the
gold. And what’s the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign— the roaring
and devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.”
“There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of
world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg— all tattooing—looks like the
signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes;
looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the

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Moby-Dick 324

bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back country.
And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of his thigh— I guess it’s
Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t know what to make of the doubloon; he
takes it for an old button off some king’s trowsers. But, aside again! here comes
that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his
pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign
to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin— fire worshipper, depend
upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip— poor boy! would he had died, or
I; he’s half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these interpreters myself
included— and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand
away again and hear him. Hark!”
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind, poor
fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
“Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
“Well, that’s funny.”
“And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a crow, especially
when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a
crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of
old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.”
“Wonder if he means me?—complimentary—poor lad!—I could go hang myself.
Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can stand the rest, for they have
plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”
“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all one fire to unscrew
it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence? Then again, if it stays
here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s nailed to the mast it’s a sign that things
grow desperate. Ha! ha! old Ahab! the White Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine
tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver
ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding ring. How did it get there? And so
they’ll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a
doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the
precious, precious gold!—the green miser’ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes
‘mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey,
hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!”

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Chapter C
Leg and Arm

The Pequod of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London

“Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”
So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down
under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-
deck, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly
reclining in his own boat’s bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, goodnatured, fine-
looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung
round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed
behind him like the broidered arm of a huzzar’s surcoat.
“Hast seen the White Whale!”
“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up
a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet.
“Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
him—“Stand by to lower!”
In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew were
dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger. But here a curious
difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten
that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea
but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical
contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any
other vessel at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody—
except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen— to clamber up a
ship’s side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up
towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson.
So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied
with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy
landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly
hope to attain.
It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance that
befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably
irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in the present instance, all this was heightened
by the sight of the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair of
tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink them
that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea bannisters.
Moby-Dick 326

But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange captain, observing
at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, “I see, I see!— avast heaving there! Jump,
boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle.”
As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two previous,
and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved blubber-hook, now
clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who
at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it
was like sitting in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then
giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his
own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle.
Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the
capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain
advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two
sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones
together!—an arm and a leg!— an arm that never can shrink, d’ye see; and a leg
that never can run. Where did’st thou see the White Whale?—how long ago?”
“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the
East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope; There I saw
him, on the Line, last season.”
“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from the
capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.
“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”
“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”
“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,” began the
Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day we
lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a
regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling round so that my
boat’s crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale.
Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a
milky-white head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”
“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath.
“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin. Aye, aye— they were mine—my
irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but on!”
“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly. “Well, this old
great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, and
goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick— I know him.”
“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not know; but
in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn’t know
it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on
to his hump! instead of the other whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking.
Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was— the noblest and
biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling
rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the
tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat’s crew for a pull on a
whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s
here (by the way, Captain—Mounttop; Mounttop—the captain);— as I was saying,
I jumped into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with
mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have

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it. But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls alive, man—the next instant, in a
jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes out—all befogged and bedeadened with black
foam—the whale’s tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like
a marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with
a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to
toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two,
leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through the
wreck, as though it was all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I
seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like
a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish,
taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed
second iron towing along near me caught me here” (clapping his hand just below
his shoulder); “yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell’s flames, I
was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript its
way along the flesh— clear along the whole length of my arm—came out nigh my
wrist, and up I floated;—and that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way,
captain—Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon: Bunger, my lad,— the captain). Now, Bunger
boy, spin your part of the yarn.”
The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the time
standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his gentlemanly rank on
board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed in a faded
blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing
his attention between a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the
other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled
captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and
straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.
“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my advice,
Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy-”
“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed captain,
addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”
“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot weather
there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat up with him nights; was
very severe with him in the matter of diet-”
“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his voice,
“Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn’t see to put on the
bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o’clock in the morning.
Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great
watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out!
why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I’d
rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man.”
“My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”— said the imper-
turbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is apt to be facetious
at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But I may as well say—en
passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of
the reverend clergy—am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink-”
“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to him; fresh
water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with the arm story.”
“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing, sir, before
Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest endeav-

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ors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly
gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long. I
measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened,
and off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is
against all rule”— pointing at it with the marlingspike—“that is the captain’s work,
not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put
to the end, to knock some one’s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once.
He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir”—removing
his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull,
but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a
wound— “Well, the captain there will tell you how that came there; he knows.”
“No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with it. Oh, you
solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another Bunger in the watery
world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be
preserved to future ages, you rascal.”
“What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
impatiently listening to this byeplay between the two Englishmen.
“Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, Oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we didn’t see
him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn’t then know what whale
it was that had served me such a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back
to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick—as some call him—and then I knew it was
he.”
“Did’st thou cross his wake again?”
“Twice.”
“But could not fasten?”
“Didn’t want to try to; ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without this other
arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he swallows.”
“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to get the right.
Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain
in succession—“Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale
are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for
him to completely digest even a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you
take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means
to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he
is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making
believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest,
and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and
he heaved it up in small tacks, d’ye see? No possible way for him to digest that
jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain
Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the
sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why, in that case the arm is
yours; only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.”
“No, thank you, Bunger,” said the English Captain, “he’s welcome to the arm he
has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to another one. No
more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me.
There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load
of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so,
Captain?”—glancing at the ivory leg.
“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that

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accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long since
thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”
“Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round
Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; “this man’s blood—bring the thermome-
ter!—it’s at the boiling point!— his pulse makes these planks beat!—sir!”—taking a
lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab’s arm.
“Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—“Man the boat! Which
way heading?”
“Good God!” cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put. “What’s
the matter? He was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain crazy?” whispering
Fedallah.
But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take the boat’s
steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards him commanded the
ship’s sailors to stand by to lower.
In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men were
springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the
stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside
of the Pequod.

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Chapter CI
The Decanter

Ere the English ship fades from sight be it set down here, that she hailed from
London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the
original of the famous whaling house of enderby and sons; a house which in my poor
whaleman’s opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors
and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our
Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents
do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the first English ships that
ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years previous
(ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard
had in large fleets pursued the Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic:
not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were the first
among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for
half a century they were the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.
In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the
sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the
first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the great South Sea.
The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold
full of the precious sperm, the Amelia’s example was soon followed by other ships,
English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were
thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable house again
bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons—how many, their mother only knows—and
under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British
government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of
discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler
made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service; how much does not appear. But
this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own,
to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship— well called the
“Syren”—made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great Japanese
Whaling Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage
was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present
day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for
the great South Sea of the other world.
The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast sailer and a
noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the Patagonian
Moby-Dick 331

coast, and drank good flip down in the forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they
were all trumps—every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And
that fine gam I had— long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
ivory heel— it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship; and may
my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever lose sight of it. Flip? Did
I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when
the squall came (for it’s squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands— visitors
and all—were called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing
each other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into
the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning example
to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we
scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt
spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it
for my taste.
The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was bullbeef; others,
that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that was. They had
dumplings too; small, but substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible
dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after
they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching
out of you like billiard-balls. The bread— but that couldn’t be helped; besides, it
was an anti-scorbutic, in short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had.
But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark
corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering
the dimensions of the cook’s boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore
and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip
and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.
But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English
whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous, hospitable ships; that passed
round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the joke; and were not soon weary
of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell you. The abounding good cheer
of these English whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all
sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders,
and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery; and
what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a
general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English
whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and
natural, but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some special origin,
which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.
During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient
Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about
whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I concluded that this must be
the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale
ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the
production of one “Fitz Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned
man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St.
Potts, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles
for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured
me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean “The Cooper,” but “The Merchant.” In short,

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this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and,
among other subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And
in this chapter it was, headed, “Smeer,” or “Fat,” that I found a long detailed list of
the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which
list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
0084400,000 lbs. of beef.
60,000 lbs. Friesland pork.
150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
550,000 lbs. of biscuit.
72,000 lbs. of soft bread.
2,800 firkins of butter.
20,000 lbs. of Texel and Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article).
550 ankers of Geneva.
10,800 barrels of beer.
Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the present
case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and
gills of good gin and good cheer.
At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef,
and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested
to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I
compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-
fish, & c., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and
Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and
Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally
unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their vocation,
and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very
coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial natives pledge each other in
bumpers of train oil.
The quantity of the beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar
fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the
whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and
from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning
30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all;
therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’
allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. Now, whether
these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been,
were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat’s head, and take good aim at flying
whales; this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit
them too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well
with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt
to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous
loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of two
or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English whalers have not
neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if
you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And
this empties the decanter.

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Chapter CII
A Bower in the Arsacides

Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon
the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior
structural features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him,
it behoves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his
hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints
of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
unconditional skeleton.
But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery,
pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite
Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea;
and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself,
Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a
cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of
discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-
pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats,
dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.
I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the
skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an opportunity to
dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was
once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs
of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go,
without using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading
all the contents of that young cub?
And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic, full
grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late royal friend
Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at Tranque, years ago,
when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the
Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a
sea-side glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his
capital.
Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with
a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella
whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly carved
woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic
Moby-Dick 334

canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-
freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually
long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a cocoa-
nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. When the
vast body had at last been stripped of its fathomdeep enfoldings, and the bones
become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the
Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean
annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished
aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its vapory spout; while,
suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like
the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.
It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees
stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was
as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils
formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all
their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying
air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great
sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver!
unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!— whither flows the fabric? what palace may it
deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!— but
one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies— the figures float from forth the
loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves;
and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that
humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape
it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all
material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles;
those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened
casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for
so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard
afar.
Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great, white,
worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet, as the ever-woven verdant
warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the
cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming
greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised
Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the skull
an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet had issued, I
marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed.
But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet of his was
genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton— brushed the vines aside—broke
through the ribs—and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid
its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbors. But soon my line was out; and
following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing
within; naught was there but bones.
Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton. From
their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the altitude of the final

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rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st thou measure this our god! That’s for us.”
“Aye, priests—well, how long do ye make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest
rose among them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces
with their yard-sticks— the great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky chance, I
quickly concluded my own admeasurements.
These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it recorded,
that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied measurements I please.
Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy. There
is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports
of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales.
Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire,
they have what the proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or
River Whale in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England,
Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession
the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown
magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s.
In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were
originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King Tranquo seizing
his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of
those parts. Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a
great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities—spread
out his ribs like a gigantic fan— and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to
be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show round
future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging
twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to
hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view
from his forehead.
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim
from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that
period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as
I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank
page for a poem I was then composing— at least, what untattooed parts might
remain—I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at
all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.

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Chapter CIII
Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton

In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching
the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a
statement may prove useful here.
According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon
Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of
sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the
largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less
than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety
tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the
combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.
Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan,
to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?
Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth,
tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most
interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull
embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by
far the most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in
this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we
proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we
are about to view.
In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet: so
that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long;
for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared with the
living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet,
leaving some fifty feet of plain backbone. Attached to this back-bone, for something
less than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once
enclosed his vitals.
To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending
far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great ship
new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted,
and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.
The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six feet
long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively longer, till you came to
the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and
some inches. From that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last
Moby-Dick 337

only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly
correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In some of
the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay footpath bridges over small
streams.
In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance,
so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no means the
mould of his invested form. The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones,
occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest
depth of the invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen
feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet. So
that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that
part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been
once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels.
Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of
the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!
How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to com-
prehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated
skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils;
only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded
sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane, to pile
its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it’s done, it looks much
like Pompey’s Pillar.
There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not locked
together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire, forming
solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width something
less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The smallest, where the spine
tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a
white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been
lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children, who had stolen them to
play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living
things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.

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Chapter CIV
The Fossil Whale

From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge,
amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good
rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his
furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think
of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables
and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to approve
myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest
seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.
Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical
peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and
antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an
ant or a flea— such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandilo-
quent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to
this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that
whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations,
I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for
that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more
fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it
may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan?
Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s
quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the
mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me
faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons,
past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and
throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying,
is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a
mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can
ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a
geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and
also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of
all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while
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in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost
completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary
formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the
antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered
the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period,
which is the last preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them
precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently
akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking ranks as Cetacean fossils.
Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and
skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at the
base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States
of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more curious of such remains is
part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris,
a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones
disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s time. Cuvier
pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic
species.
But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete vast
skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge
Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for
the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile,
and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it
being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this
alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A significant illustration
of the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale
furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened
the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society,
pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the
mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.
When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs,
and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of
sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities
to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by
a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have
begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I
obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions
of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of
this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible.
Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along
the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like
Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s. Methuselah
seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at
this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which,
having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype
plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon
Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous
character, we find the unmistakable print of his fin. In an apartment of the great
temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite

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ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and

dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns.
Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that
planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the
whale, in his own osseous postdiluvian reality, as set down by the venerable John
Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which
are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up
dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed
by God upon the Temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death. But the
truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot
two Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon ’em. They
keep a Whale’s Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the
Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot
be reached by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to
have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that a
Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do not stand
to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the
Temple.”
In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a Nantucketer,
and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.

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Chapter CV
Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?
— Will He Perish?

Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the head-
waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his
generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk of his sires.
But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the present
day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found in the Tertiary
system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to man), but of the whales found
in that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those
of its earlier ones.
Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the Alabama one
mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than seventy feet in length in the
skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two
feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s
authority, that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the
time of capture.
But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an advance in
magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it not be, that since
Adam’s time they have degenerated?
Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such gentlemen
as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells us of Whales that
embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight
hundred feet in length— Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even
in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke’s naturalists, we find a Danish member
of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or
Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty
feet. And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in
the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred
metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work was published so late
as A.D. 1825.
But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as big as
his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more
than he was), will make bold to tell him so. Because I cannot understand how it is,
that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried thousands of years before even
Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in
Moby-Dick 342

his socks; and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian
and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as
plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal,
but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh’s fat kine; in the face of all this,
I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.
But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more recondite
Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads
of the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring’s straits, and into the
remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and
lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can
long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at
last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke
his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which,
not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and
Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows
upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you
land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem
furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period ago—not
a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men
now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains
in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the
spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids
so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm
Whales for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank
God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the
old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west (in
whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of
moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of
sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes;
a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated.
Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favor of the gradual extinc-
tion 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-

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Moby-Dick 343

bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate
glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes! and in a charmed
circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one cachalot,
some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this positive havoc has
already very seriously diminished their battalions. But though for some time past
a number of these whales, not less than 13,000, have been annually slain on the
nor’west coast by the Americans alone; yet there are considerations which render
even this circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in this
matter.
Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of the
more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian
of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants;
that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate
climes. And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now
been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all
the successive monarchs of the East— if they still survive there in great numbers,
much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to
expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe
and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined.
Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of whales,
their probably attaining the age of a century and more, therefore at any one period
of time, several distinct adult generations must be contemporary. And what this
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.

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Chapter CVI
Ahab’s Leg

The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby
of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his own person.
He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had
received a half-splintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his
own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to
the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough);
then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench, that
though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem
it entirely trustworthy.
And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading,
mad recklessness, Ahab, did at times give careful heed to the condition of that
dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to the
Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone
upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable,
unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it
had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme
difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.
Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish
of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too
plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates
his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every
felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally,
thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the
ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from
certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no
children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by
the joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall
still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond
the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper
analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities
ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all
heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do
their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of
these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures
of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and softcymballing,
Moby-Dick 345

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.

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Chapter CVII
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-hand, 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
landbird 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 carpen-
ter 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,
Moby-Dick 347

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, antedilu-
vian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled
wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch
on the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a
life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss;
but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have
originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral;
uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this
world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in
him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem
to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored
to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind
of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his
brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his
fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in
parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior— though a little swelled—of
a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also
screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers.
So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do
was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up
by the legs, and there they were.
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after
all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him,
he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was,
whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But
there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this
it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that
kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel,
which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this
soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.

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Chapter CVIII
Ahab and the Carpenter

The Deck — First Night Watch

(Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two lanterns busily
filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory,
leather straps, pads, screws, and various tools of all sorts lying about the bench.
Forward, the red flame of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work.)
Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft, and that is soft
which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and shin bones. 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 ferrule 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 shin-bone—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.
Moby-Dick 349

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

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Moby-Dick 350

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 bed-fellow! 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!

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Chapter CIX
Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin

According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no inconsid-
erable 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.*
In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a
regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the casks
with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by the ship’s
pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight; while by the changed
character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any serious leakage
in the precious cargo.
Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the
Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China waters
into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of the oriental
archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one representing the long
eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his
snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a
long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back
to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again.
“Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to it. “On
deck! Begone!”
“Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We must up
Burtons and break out.”
“Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here for a
week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”
“Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a
year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir.”
“So it is, so it is; if we get it.”
“I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”
“And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak! I’m all
aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks
are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t
stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to
plug it, even if found, in this life’s howling gale? Starbuck! I’ll not have the Burtons
hoisted.”
“What will the owners say, sir?”
Moby-Dick 352

“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!” mur-
mured 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.

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Chapter CX
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
Moby-Dick 354

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

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Moby-Dick 355

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 at-
tentive 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 the 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

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Moby-Dick 356

this;— at a critical moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was
leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not
die yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of
his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was
Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not
kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent
destroyer of that sort.
Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that while
a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick
savage is almost half-well again in a day. So, in good time my Queequeg gained
strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but
eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms
and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing
into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for
a fight.
With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying
into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he
spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it
seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted
tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet
and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body
a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of
attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold;
a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read,
though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore
destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were
inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which
suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away
from surveying poor Queequeg—“Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”

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Chapter CXI
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 seems 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 California 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
The Blacksmith

Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in these lati-
tudes, 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, pikeheads, harpoons, and lances, and jealously
watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man’s was a
patient hammer wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance
did come from him. Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically
broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his
hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was.—Most miserable!
A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing in
his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of the mariners.
And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had finally given in; and
so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.
Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter’s midnight, on the road running
between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness
stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was,
the loss of the extremities of both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last
came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied
fifth act of the grief of his life’s drama.
He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered
that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed
excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful,
daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a
cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness,
and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid
into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the
blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It
was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend,
and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the
blacksmith’s shop was in the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance
Moby-Dick 359

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 sunrise, and by fall of eve,
the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.

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Chapter CXIII
The Forge

With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day,
Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an iron-wood
log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the other at his forge’s
lungs, when Captain Ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking
leathern bag. While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till
at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the
anvil—the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights, some of which
flew close to Ahab.
“Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? they are always flying in thy
wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they burn; but thou—thou
liv’st among them without a scorch.”
“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting for a
moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching-, not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.”
“Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In
no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou
should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can’st thou
endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go
mad?— What wert thou making there?”
“Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.”
“And can’st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard usage as
it had?”
“I think so, sir.”
“And I suppose thou can’st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind how
hard the metal, blacksmith?”
“Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”
“Look ye here then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with both
hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here—here—can ye smoothe out a seam like
this, blacksmith,” sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow; “if thou could’st,
blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest
hammer between my eyes. Answer! Can’st thou smoothe this seam?”
“Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?”
“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for though thou
only see’st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone of my skull—that
is all wrinkles! But, away with child’s play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look
ye here!” jingling the leathern bag, as if it were full of gold coins. “I, too, want a
Moby-Dick 361

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

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Moby-Dick 362

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 halfway along the
pole’s length, and firmly secured so, with inter-twistings 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!

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Chapter CXIV
The Gilder

Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising ground the
Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve,
fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats,
steadily pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty
or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success
for their pains.
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving
swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the
soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale;
these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and
brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and
would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial,
confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery
earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling
forward, not through high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling
prairie: as when the western emigrants’ horses only show their erected ears, while
their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.
The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals
the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in
these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked.
And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way
meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.
Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as temporary
an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own
secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.
Oh, grassy glades! oh ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though
long parched by the dead drought of the earthly 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
Moby-Dick 364

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 eyes!— 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!”

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Chapter CXV
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’
state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and
the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for
a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their
chests, and filled them; it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head
on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot
and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled
them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons
pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony
of his entire satisfaction.
As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian
sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a
crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge try-pots, which, covered with
the parchment-like poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to
every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and
harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from
the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured aloft
Moby-Dick 366

between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering
fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others
of the ship’s company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of the try-works, from
which the huge pots had been removed. You would have almost thought they were
pulling down the cursed Bastille, such wild cries they raised, as the now useless
brick and mortar were being hurled into the sea.
Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship’s elevated
quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before him, and seemed
merely contrived for his own individual diversion.
And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with a
stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other’s wakes— one all jubilations
for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to come—their two captains
in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene.
“Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the gay Bachelor’s commander, lifting a glass
and a bottle in the air.
“Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply.
“No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,” said the other good-
humoredly. “Come aboard!”
“Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?”
“Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all;—but come aboard, old hearty,
come along. I’ll soon take that black from your brow. Come along, will ye (merry’s
the play); a full ship and homeward-bound.”
“How wondrous familiar is a fool!” muttered Ahab; then aloud, “Thou art a full
ship and homeward bound, thou 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 homewardbound craft, he took from his pocket a small
vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing
two remote associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings.

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Chapter CXVI
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
Moby-Dick 368

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!”

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Chapter CXVII
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!”
Moby-Dick 370

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.

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Chapter CXVIII
The Quadrant

The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab, coming from
his cabin cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his
spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there
with all their eyes centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to
point the ship’s prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon
high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about taking
his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his latitude.
Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences.
That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean’s
immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the
horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable
splendors of God’s throne. Well that Ahab’s quadrant was furnished with 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 seamark! 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
Moby-Dick 372

the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast
man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old
eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s
horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God
had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to
the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass,
and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show
me my place on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on
thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!”
As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead
feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic despair
that seemed meant for himself— these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee’s
face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their
commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly
pacing the deck, shouted out—“To the braces! Up helm!—square in!”
In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon her
heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her long, ribbed hull,
seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient steed.
Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s tumultuous
way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck.
“I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented
flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man
of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap
of ashes!”
“Aye,” cried Stubb, “but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck— sea-coal,
not your common charcoal. Well, well! I heard Ahab mutter, ‘Here some one thrusts
these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no
others.’ And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!”

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Chapter CXIX
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 mast fluttering here and there with the rags
which the first fury of the tempest had left for its after sport.
Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every flash
of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster might have befallen
the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were directing the men in the
higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught.
Though lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did
not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship’s high
teetering side, stove in the boat’s bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping
through like a sieve.
“Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the wreck, “but the
sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave
has such a great long start before it leaps, all round the world it runs, and then
comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I have to meet it, is just across the
deck here. But never mind; it’s all in fun: so the old song says;”—(sings.)
Oh! jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A’ flourishin’ his tail,—
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky
lad, is the Ocean, oh!
The scud all a flyin’,
That’s his flip only foamin’;
When he stirs in the spicin’,—
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky
lad, is the Ocean, oh!
Thunder splits the ships,
Moby-Dick 374

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.”

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Moby-Dick 375

“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! the corpusants!

All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed
lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was
silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an
altar.
“Blast the boat! let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing sea heaved
up under his own little craft so that its gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he
was passing a lashing. “Blast it!”—but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted
eyes caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried—“The corpusants
have mercy on us all!”
To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of the calm,
and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from the topsail-yard-
arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom
have I heard a common oath when God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship;
when His “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin” has been woven into the shrouds and the
cordage.
While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted
crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that
pale phosphorescence, like a faraway 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 main-mast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee
was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near
by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged
securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together,
and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In
various enchanted attitudes like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in
Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast.
“Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but
lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would
fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So.”

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Moby-Dick 376

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; whenceso’er I
came; whereso’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
eyeballs 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 do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery
father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her?
There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence
callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself
unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent.
There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy
eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self,
my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial,
thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with
haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I
burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”
“The boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old man!”
Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed in its
conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat’s bow; but the sea
that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from
the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the
silent harpoon burned there like a serpent’s tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the
arm—“God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! ‘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

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Moby-Dick 377

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.

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Chapter CXX
The Deck Toward 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 hunchbacked 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
Midnight — The Forecastle Bulwarks

Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the anchors
there hanging.
No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you will
never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long ago is it since
you said the very contrary? Didn’t you once say that whatever ship Ahab sails in,
that ship should pay something extra on its insurance policy, just as though it were
loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn’t you
say so?”
“Well, suppose I did? What then! I’ve part changed my flesh since that time,
why not my mind? Besides, supposing we are loaded with powder barrels aft and
lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get afire in this drenching spray
here? Why, my little man, you have pretty red hair, but you couldn’t get afire now.
Shake yourself; you’re Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at
your coat collar. Don’t you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine Insurance
companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But hark, again,
and I’ll answer ye the other thing. First take your leg off from the crown of the
anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope; now listen. What’s the mighty difference
between holding a mast’s lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast
that hasn’t got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don’t you see, you timber-head,
that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first struck? What
are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,—aye,
man, and all of us,—were in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all
the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I
suppose you would have every man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod
running up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer’s skewered feather, and trailing
behind like his sash. Why don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy to be sensible; why
don’t ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible.”
“I don’t know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.”
“Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, it’s hard to be sensible, that’s a fact. And I
am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the turn there, and pass it.
Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors now as if they were never going
to be used again. Tying these two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man’s
hands behind him. And what big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are
your iron fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the
world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable,
Moby-Dick 380

though. There, hammer that knot down, and we’ve done. So; next to touching land,
lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts, will
ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a long-tailed
coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that
way, serve to carry off the water, d’ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form
gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I
must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes
my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should
be so unmannerly! This is a nasty night, lad.”

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Chapter CXXII
Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and
Lightning

The Main-top-sail yard — Tashtego passing new lashings around it.

“Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What’s the
use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass
of rum. Um, um, um!”
Chapter CXXIII
The Musket

During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod’s jaw-
bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic
motions even though preventer tackles had been attached to it— for they were
slack—because some play to the tiller was indispensable.
In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it
is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round
and round. It was thus with the Pequod’s; at almost every shock the helmsman had
not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it
is a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb— one engaged forward and the other
aft—the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift
from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross,
which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.
The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a storm-trysail
was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the water with some precision
again; and the course— for the present, East-south-east—which he was to steer, if
practicable, was once more given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the
gale, he had only steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing
the ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good
sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze became fair!
Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “Ho! the fair wind! oh-ye-
ho cheerly, men!” the crew singing for joy, that so promising an event should so soon
have falsified the evil portents preceding it.
In compliance with the standing order of his commander— to report immediately,
and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change in the affairs of
the deck,—Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze—however
reluctantly and gloomily,—than he mechanically went below to apprise Captain
Ahab of the circumstance.
Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment.
The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that— was burning fitfully,
and casting fitful shadows upon the old man’s bolted door,—a thin one, with fixed
blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the
cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round
by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly
Moby-Dick 383

revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an
honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the
muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or
good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself.
“He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very musket that
he pointed at me;—that one with the studded stock; let me touch it—lift it. Strange,
that I, who have handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so
now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;— that’s not good. Best
spill it?—wait. I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly while I think.—I
come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom,— that’s
fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind that’s only fair for that accursed fish.—The
very tube he pointed at me!—the very one; this one—I hold it here; he would have
killed me with the very thing I handle now.—Aye and he would fain kill all his
crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed
his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way
by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did
he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man
be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?—Yes,
it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come
to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if
Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant— put aside, that crime would not
be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,—in there, he’s sleeping.
Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I can’t withstand thee, then, old
man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this
thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest.
Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs. Great God
forbid!— But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to be
taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living power from his own living
hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with
ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more
hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly
his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on the long
intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and
locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and
a whole continent between me and law.—Aye, aye, ’tis so.— Is heaven a murderer
when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and
skin together?— And would I be a murderer, then, if ”—and slowly, stealthily, and
half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against the door.
“On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and
Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.— Oh Mary! Mary!—boy!
boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded
deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where
art Thou? Shall I? shall I?—The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and
main topsails are reefed and set! she heads her course.”
“Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!”
Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man’s tormented
sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long dumb dream to speak.
The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel; Starbuck
seemed wrestling with an angel, but turning from the door, he placed the death-tube

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Moby-Dick 384

in its rack, and left the place.

“He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I
must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to say.”

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Chapter CXXIV
The Needle

Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk,
and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on like giants’ palms
outspread. The strong unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed
vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the
full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his
place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned
Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of
molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the
teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright
sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned
behind, and saw the sun’s rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were
blending with his undeviating wake.
“Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun.
Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke on the further
billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”
But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the helm,
huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.
“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist.
“Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”
Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by
Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding palpableness
must have been the cause.
Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the
compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger.
Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and
the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man
with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last
night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s all. Thou hast before now heard of
such a thing, I take it.”
“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate, gloomily.
Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than one
case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as developed in
Moby-Dick 386

the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in
heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be. In
instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down
some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still
more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic
steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle. But in either case, the
needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if
the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may
be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.
Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses,
the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing
of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his
orders for the ship’s course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and
once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the
supposed fair one had only been juggling her.
Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but
quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—who in some small
degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced.
As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater
than their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost
wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into
their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.
For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip
with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had
the day before dashed to the deck.
“Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and
to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the
level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without the pole; a top-maul, and the
smallest of the sail-maker’s needles. Quick!”
Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to
do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the
spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as
that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by
transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over
by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.
“Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the
things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old Ahab’s needles; but out
of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any.”
Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was
said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But
Starbuck looked away.
With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and
then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright,
without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the
upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and
less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before.
Then going through some small strange motions with it—whether indispensable to
the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is
uncertain— he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the

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Moby-Dick 387

two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle,
over one of the compass cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering
and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had
been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and
pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—“Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab
be not the lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”
One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade
such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.

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Chapter CXXV
The Log and Line

While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log and line
had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of
determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially
when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and
frequently more for form’s sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon
the customary slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average
rate of progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel
and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after
bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; the sun and wind had warped it; all the
elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his
mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after
the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled
his frantic oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern
the billows rolled in riots.
“Forward, there! Heave the log!”
Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. “Take
the reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”
They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the deck,
with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy,
sidelong-rushing sea.
The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends
of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log
hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.
Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to
form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was
intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to speak.
“Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.”
“‘Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou
seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”
“I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine
’tis not worth while disputing, ‘specially with a superior, who’ll ne’er confess.”
“What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s granite-founded
College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert thou born?”
“In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”
“Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”
Moby-Dick 389

“I know not, sir, but I was born there.”

“In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man from Man; a
man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked
in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at
last. Up with it! So.”
The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging
line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised
and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the old
reelman to stagger strangely.
“Hold hard!”
Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was
gone.
“I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts
the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman.
And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See to it.”
“There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the skewer seems
loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run
whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help;
eh, Pip?”
“Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whaleboat. Pip’s missing. Let’s see
now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he’s holding
on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there’s his arm
just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off—we haul in no cowards here.
Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”
“Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. “Away
from the quarter-deck!”
“The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, advancing. “Hands off
from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
“Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”
“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes.
Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art
thou, boy?”
“Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of
clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly— quickest known by that! Ding,
dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip the coward?”
“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look
down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative
libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives.
Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my
heart-strings. Come, let’s down.”
“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and
feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had
ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls
may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the
black one with the white, for I will not let this go.”
“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than
are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in
man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man,
though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love

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Moby-Dick 390

and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I
grasped an Emperor’s!”
“There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman.
“One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness.
But here’s the end of the rotten line—all dripping, too.
Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether.
I’ll see Mr. Stubb about it.”

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Chapter CXXVI
The Life-Buoy

Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress solely
determined by Ahab’s level log and line; the Pequod held on her path towards the
Equator. Making so long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying
no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves
monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous
and desperate scene.
At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial
fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by
a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so
plaintively wild and unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all
Herod’s murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from their reveries, and
for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixed by listening,
like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The
Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but
the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest
mariner of all—declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the
voices of newly drowned men in the sea.
Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he came to
the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied with hinted
dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus explained the wonder.
Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers of
seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost
their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and
sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of them,
because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not
only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of
their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water
alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been
mistaken for men.
But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible confirmation
in the fate of one of their number that morning. At sun-rise this man went from his
hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half
waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether
it was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not
been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a rushing—and looking
Moby-Dick 392

up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of
white bubbles in the blue of the sea.
The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where it always
hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having
long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and the parched
wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the
sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the
White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed
up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort,
they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not
as a fore-shadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already
presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they
had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.
The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it; but
as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish eagerness of
what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were impatient of any
toil but what was directly connected with its final end, whatever that might prove
to be; therefore, they were going to leave the ship’s stern unprovided with a buoy,
when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning
his coffin.
“A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting.
“Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb.
“It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here can arrange it
easily.”
“Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause.
“Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so— the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig
it.”
“And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a hammer.
“Aye.”
“And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a caulking-iron.
“Aye.”
“And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his hand as with a
pitch-pot.
Away! What possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no
more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”
“He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks. Now I
don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman;
but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won’t put his head into it. Are all my
pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I’m ordered to make a life-buoy
of it. It’s like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I
don’t like this cobbling sort of business— I don’t like it at all; it’s undignified; it’s
not my place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take
in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that
regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to
an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in the middle, and at
the beginning at the end. It’s the old woman’s tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord!
what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five
who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the reason I never

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would work for lonely widow old women ashore when I kept my job-shop in the
Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads to run off with me.
But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid;
caulk the seams; pay over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it
with the snap-spring over the ship’s stern. Were ever such things done before with
a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging,
ere they would do the job. But I’m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don’t budge.
Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind.
We workers in woods make bridal bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and
hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the
why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we
stash it if we can. Hem! I’ll do the job, now, tenderly. I’ll have me—let’s see—how
many in the ship’s company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Any way, I’ll have me thirty
separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the
coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one
coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron,
pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s to it.”

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Chapter CXXVII
The Deck

The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open hatchway;
the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding
from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock.—Ahab comes slowly from the
cabin-gangway, and hears Pip following him.
Back lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with
my humor more genially than that boy.— Middle aisle of a church! What’s here?”
“Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the hatchway!”
“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”
“Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”
“Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?”
“I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”
“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”
“Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they’ve set
me now to turning it into something else.”
“Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling, monopolizing,
heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap
them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled
as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades.”
“But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.”
“The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The
Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; and
the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?”
“Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the reason why
the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade,
sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark to it.”
“Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in all things
makes the sounding-board is this— there’s naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a
body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a
bier, and heard the coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in?
“Faith, sir, I’ve-”
“Faith? What’s that?”
“Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like— that’s all, sir.”
“Um, um; go on.”
“I was about to say, sir, that-”
Moby-Dick 395

“Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy
bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”
“He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes.
I’ve heard that the Isle of Albermarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator
right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right
in his middle. He’s always under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this
way—come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and
I’m the professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”
(Ahab to himself)
“There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The greyheaded wood-pecker tapping the
hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two
line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s
seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but
imponderable thoughts? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a
mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life.
A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense
the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that. But no. So
far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one,
seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that
accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again.
Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee!
Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!”

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Chapter CXXVIII
The Pequod Meets the Rachel

Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the
Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was
making good speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger
shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are burst,
and all life fled from the smitten hull.
“Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully
hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and
would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain himself,
having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending her side. A few keen pulls,
and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod’s main-chains, and he sprang to the
deck. Immediately he was recognized by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no
formal salutation was exchanged.
“Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!” cried Ahab, closely advancing. “How
was it?”
It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while three
of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which had led them
some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were yet in swift chase to
windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out
of the blue water, not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat— a
reserved one—had been instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the
wind, this fourth boat—the swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in
fastening—at least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about
it. In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of
bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded that
the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often
happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall
signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three
far to windward boats—ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite
direction— the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till
near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her
crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail on stunsail— after the
Moby-Dick 397

missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft
on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain
the presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to
lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again
dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued
doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.
The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in
boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search; by
sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping
a double horizon, as it were.
“I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some one in that
missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap, his watch— he’s so cursed
anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one
missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how
pale he looks— pale in the very buttons of his eyes—look—it wasn’t the coat— it
must have been the-”
“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I conjure”— here
exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily received his
petition. “For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship—I will gladly pay
for it, and roundly pay for it— if there be no other way—for eight-and-forty hours
only—only that— you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.”
“His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the coat and
watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”
“He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old Manx sailor standing
behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”
Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel’s the more
melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the Captain’s sons
among the number of the missing boat’s crew; but among the number of the other
boats’ crews, at the same time, but on the other hand, separated from the ship
during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had been still another son; as
that for a time, the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest
perplexity; which was only solved for him by his chief mate’s instinctively adopting
the ordinary procedure of a whaleship in such emergencies, that is, when placed
between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first. But the
captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning
all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he allude to his one yet missing
boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving
hardihood of a Nantucketer’s paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in
the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race.
Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such
tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’ voyage in some
other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman’s career shall
be unenervated by any chance display of a father’s natural but untimely partiality,
or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and
Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering
of his own.
“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would
have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab—though

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Moby-Dick 398

but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a child of your old age too— Yes, yes,
you relent; I see it—run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.”
“Avast,” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice that prolongingly
moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time,
Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.
Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present
instant warn off all strangers; then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as
before.”
Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the
strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest
suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more
fell than stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship.
Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in
view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on
the sea. This way and that her yards were swung around; starboard and larboard,
she continued to tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her
before it; while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men,
as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that
this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel,
weeping for her children, because they were not.

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Chapter CXXIX
The Cabin

(Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.)

Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when
Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that
in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this
hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where
they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my
own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.”
“No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost
leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.”
“Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of
man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he
grows so sane again.”
“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones
now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye,
sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.”
“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell
thee no; it cannot be.”
“Oh good master, master, master!
“Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and
thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there.
And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to
its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,— God for ever save
thee, let what will befall.”
(Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.)
“Here he this instant stood, I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now were even
poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s
seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor
bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here:
Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the
transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here,
our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at
table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets!
epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding. Pass round the decanters; glad to see
ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host to white
men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?— a little
Moby-Dick 400

negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat
once;—seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon
all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table.
Shame upon all cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory— Oh, master! master!
I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though this
stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.”

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Chapter CXXX
The Hat

And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary
cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept— seemed to have chased his foe into
an oceanfold, to slay him the more securely there; now, that he found himself hard
by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted;
now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually
encountered Moby Dick;— and now that all his successive meetings with various
ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the
white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that
there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for
feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic,
six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now
fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered
above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide
beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.
In this foreshadowing interval, too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. Stubb
no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and
sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in
the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about
the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours when he
thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that even as Ahab’s
eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at
least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness
began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that
the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he
were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some
unseen being’s body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night,
even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would
stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly
say— We two watchmen never rest.
Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck,
unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing
the planks between two undeviating limits,—the main-mast and the mizen; or else
they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,—his living foot advanced upon the deck,
as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he
Moby-Dick 402

stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his
hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly
whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still
intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole
hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon
that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s
sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no
more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,— breakfast and dinner:
supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as
unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though
perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become one
watch on deck; and though the Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission
as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless
at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though
such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck
crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by
night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At
times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight;
Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the main-mast; but still fixedly gazing upon each
other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his
abandoned substance.
And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every
instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,— Ahab seemed an independent
lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen
tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he
may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from
aft,—“Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till after sunset and after
twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman’s bell, was
heard—“What d’ye see?— sharp! sharp! sharp!”
But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the children-seeking
Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful
of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed
to doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight
he sought. But if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from
verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”— he said. “Aye! Ahab must have
the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and
sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the mainmast head,
he received the two ends of the downwardreeved rope; and attaching one to his
basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done,
with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon
his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo,
Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye
upon the chief mate, said,—”Take the rope, sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.”
Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him
to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards
stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed

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Moby-Dick 403

abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead astern, this side, and that,—within
the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.
When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging,
which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that spot, and
sustained there by the rope; under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck
is always given in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it.
Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations
aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck; and
when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down from
the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with a constant
watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift
and fall all swooping to the sea. So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not
unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the
one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest
degree approaching to decision— one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out
he had seemed to doubt somewhat; it was strange, that this was the very man he
should select for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise
distrusted person’s hands.
Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten minutes; one
of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round
the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came
wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings.
Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards,
and went eddying again round his head.
But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to
mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being
no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see
some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.
“Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at
the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than his
level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.
But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long hooked bill at
his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it, and
thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But
only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab’s hat was
never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow:
and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black
spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.

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Chapter CXXXI
The Pequod Meets The Delight

The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-
coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight,
was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams, called
shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight
or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few
splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw through
this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching
skeleton of a horse.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his trumpet
he pointed to the wreck.
“Hast killed him?”
“The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever will do that,” answered the other,
sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some
noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out,
exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in
blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply
in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed
life!”
“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”— pointing to the hammock—“I
bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere
night. Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon
their tomb.” Then turning to his crew—“Are ye ready there? place the plank then
on the rail, and lift the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing towards the hammock
with uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life-”
“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of
the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, but
that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their ghostly
baptism.
As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at
the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.
“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake. “In vain,
Moby-Dick 405

oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your
coffin!”

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Chapter CXXXII
The Symphony

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable
in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft,
with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong,
lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled
birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps,
far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks;
and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows
without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished
them.
Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this
bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon,
a soft and tremulous motion— most seen here at the Equator—denoted the fond,
throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and un-
yielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering
Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow
to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.
Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures
that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old
Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed
elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed
locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched
how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that
he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did
at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad,
happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother
world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and
erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his
slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such
wealth as that one wee drop.
Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he
Moby-Dick 407

seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the
centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet
drew near to him, and stood there.
Ahab turned.
“Starbuck!”
“Sir.”
“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such
a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-
harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty— forty years ago!—ago! Forty years of contin-
ual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the
pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to
make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years
I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of
solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which
admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh,
weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think
of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before— and how for
forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare— fit emblem of the dry nourishment of
my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and
broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from
that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day,
leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow— wife? wife?—rather a widow with her
husband alive? Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and
then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which,
for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more
a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old
Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar,
and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh,
Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have
been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that
I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I
look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped,
as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God!
God! God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!— mockery! mockery! bitter, biting
mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus
intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it
is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green
land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and
my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when
branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no!
not with the far away home I see in that eye!”
“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should
any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters!
let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife and child of his brotherly,
sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving,
longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter the course!
How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old
Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in
Nantucket.”

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Moby-Dick 408

“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the morning.
About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now— the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in
bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the
deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
“‘Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning,
should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail! Yes, yes! no
more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course,
and let us away! See, see! the boy’s face from the window! the boy’s hand on the
hill!”
But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his
last, cindered apple to the soil.
“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening,
hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against
all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming
myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper,
natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that
lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy
in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then
can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does
that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we
are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the
handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look!
see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do
murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the airs smells now, as if it
blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the
slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown
hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye,
and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut
swarths—Starbuck!”
But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected,
fixed eyes in the water there, Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.

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Chapter CXXXIII
The Chase — First Day

That night, in the mid-watch when the old man—as his wont at intervals—stepped
forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly
thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in
drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon
that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm
whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after
inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise
bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to
be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.
The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at day-
break, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth
as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished
metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
“Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”
Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle deck,
Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed to exhale
from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their clothes in their
hands.
“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
“Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.
“T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”
All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to
the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him thither,
when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering ahead through
the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a
gull-like cry in the air. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill!
It is Moby Dick!”
Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs,
the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long
been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final perch, some feet above the other
look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast,
so that the Indian’s head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this height
the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the
credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in
Moby-Dick 410

the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around
him.
“I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out,”
said Tashtego.
“Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate reserved
the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first.
There she blows! there she blows!— there she blows!—there she blows! There
again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned
to the gradual prolongings of the whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In
stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember,
stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man,
steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand
by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,—quick, quicker!” and he slid
through the air to the deck.
“He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from us; cannot
have seen the ship yet.”
“Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up! Shiver
her!—shiver her!—So; well that! Boats, boats!”
Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails set— all the
paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading
the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a hideous motion
gnawed his mouth.
Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only
slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth;
seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it
spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting
prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if
an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish
foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond.
Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white
shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying
the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving
valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by
his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowls
softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff
rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance
projected from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed
fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched
and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the
gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa
clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid;
with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete;
not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as
he so divinely swam.
On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him
then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. No
wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and

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Moby-Dick 411

allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that
quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou
glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same
way thou mayst have bejuggled and destroyed before.
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves
whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on,
still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding
the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose
from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like
Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the
grand god revealed himself, sounded and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and
dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool
that he left.
With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three
boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.
“An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed beyond the
whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing vacancies to leeward.
It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed whirling round in his head as he
swept the watery circle. The breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell.
“The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.
In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying
towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water
there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries. Their vision was
keener than man’s; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he
peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no
bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of
white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby
Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending
with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an
open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar,
Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon
Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth’s
harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.
Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by
anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet under water. But as if
perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to
him, sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated
head lengthwise beneath the boat.
Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant,
the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting shark slowly and
feelingly taking its bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled
lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock.
The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s head,
and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale now shook the
slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah
gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each
other’s heads to gain the uttermost stern.
And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dal-

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Moby-Dick 412

lied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged
beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost
inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a
quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious
with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in
the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked
hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove,
the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as
both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in
twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating
wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck
clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across.
At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to
perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that
loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had made one final effort
to push the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further into the whale’s mouth,
and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw;
spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.
Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance,
vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the billows; and at the
same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled
forehead rose— some twenty or more feet out of the water—the now rising swells,
with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their
shivered spray still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel
billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its
summit with their scud.
This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpol-
ing) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise of the whale-lance,
in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously described. By this motion the whale
must best and most comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.
But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round and
round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful wake, as
if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault. The sight of the
splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries
cast before Antiochus’s elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half
smothered in the foam of the whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to
swim,—though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as
that; helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance
shock might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and
mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not succor him;
more than enough was it for them to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling
was the White Whale’s aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles
he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other
boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to
strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized
castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape.
With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of the direful zone,
whose centre had now become the old man’s head.
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship’s mast

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Moby-Dick 413

heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was now
so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!—“Sail on the”— but that moment a
breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But
struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,—“Sail
on the whale!—Drive him off!”
The Pequod’s prows were pointed-, and breaking up the charmed circle, she
effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the
boats flew to the rescue.
Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine caking
in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did crack, and helplessly
he yielded to his body’s doom for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s
boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails
came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.
But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more abbreviate
it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the
sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men’s whole lives.
And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree
it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous
intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire
circumferences of inferior souls.
“The harpoon,” said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one bended
arm—“is it safe?”
“Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it.
“Lay it before me;—any missing men?”
“One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here are five men.”
“That’s good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there!
going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!— Hands off from me! The eternal sap
runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail; out oars; the helm!”
It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by another
boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued with what
is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the added power of the boat
did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked
his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under
these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged,
if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an
unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some
one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the
most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats
now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the
wrecked boat having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything
to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with
stunsails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in
the leeward wake of Moby Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s
glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when
he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing
the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour
expired, his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now? D’ye see him?” and if
the reply was No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In
this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing

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the planks.
As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid
them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still greater breadth—thus to and
fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat,
which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow
to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded
sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man’s face there
now stole some such added gloom as this.
Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to evince his
own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his Captain’s mind, he
advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed— “The thistle the ass refused; it pricked
his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha! ha!”
“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not
know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a
poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.”
“Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “‘tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill
one.”
“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they
will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives’ darkling
hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb
reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands
alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!
Cold, cold—I shiver!—How now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout,
though he spout ten times a second!”
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling. Soon it
was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
“Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from the air.
“How heading when last seen?”
“As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”
“Good! he will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and top-gallant stunsails,
Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he’s making a passage now,
and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her full before the wind!—Aloft! come
down!— Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till
morning.”—Then advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast—“Men, this
gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead;
and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold
is that man’s; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum
shall be divided among all of ye! Away now! the deck is thine, sir!”
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching his
hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to see how the
night wore on.

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Chapter CXXXIV
The Chase — Second Day

At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.

“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light to spread.
“See nothing, sir.”
“Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;— the top-
gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no matter—’tis
but resting for the rush.”
Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, contin-
ued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means
unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill, prescience
of experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses
among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale
when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately
foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out
of sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in
these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general
trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at
some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise
bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the
remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his
compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through
several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future
wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the
hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this hunter’s wondrous skill, the
proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes
well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of
the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in
their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of
it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an
hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other
Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to
themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will
have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this
acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman’s
allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or wind-bound mariner is the skill
that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port?
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Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the
chase of whales.
The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannonball, missent,
becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.
“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck creeps up
one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave fellows!—Ha, ha!
Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on the sea,—for by live-oaks! my
spine’s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!”
“There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was now the mast-head
cry.
“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on and split your
spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump— blister your
lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the
stream!”
And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of the chase
had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever
pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not
only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken
up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding
bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of
the previous day; the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind,
reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all
these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of
their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed
the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though
it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron,
and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull,
which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even
so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and
guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal
goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly
tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the
other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight,
sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and
ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek
out the thing that might destroy them!
“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of
some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. “Sway me up, men; ye
have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears.”
It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other
thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for hardly had Ahab
reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its pin on deck, when he struck the
key-note to an orchestra, that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharge
of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as— much
nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead—Moby
Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by
the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now

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reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising
with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms
his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling
foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments,
the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching
is his act of defiance.
“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his immeasurable
bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen
in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky,
the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a
glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling
intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and thy har-
poon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!—stand
by!”
Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting
stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards; while Ahab, less
dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.
“Lower away,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a spare one, rigged
the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine— keep away from the boats,
but keep near them. Lower, all!”
As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant
himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab’s
boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale
head-and-head,— that is, pull straight up to his forehead,—a not uncommon thing;
for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the
whale’s sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three
boats were plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning
himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among the
boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side;
and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat, seemed only intent on
annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made. But skilfully
manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for
a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank’s breadth; while all the time,
Ahab’s unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.
But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and re-
crossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three lines now fast to
him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards
the planted irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as
if to rally for a more tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid
out more line; and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again— hoping
that way to disencumber it of some snarls—when lo!— a sight more savage than
the embattled teeth of sharks!
Caught and twisted—corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons and
lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing and dripping up to
the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat. Only one thing could be done. Seizing the
boat-knife, he critically reached within—through—and then, without—the rays of
steel; dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then,
twice sundering the rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted fagot of steel into

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the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush
among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the
more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together
like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea,
disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips
of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred
bowl of punch.
While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the
revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope little Flask
bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the
dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle
him up; and while the old man’s line—now parting—admitted of his pulling into
the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;— in that wild simultaneousness of a
thousand concreted perils,— Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards
Heaven by invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea,
the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and sent it turning
over and over, into the air; till it fell again— gunwale downwards—and Ahab and
his men struggled out from under it, like seals from a sea-side cave.
The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as he struck
the surface—involuntarily launched him along it, to a little distance from the centre
of the destruction he had made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment
slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of
plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew
back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work for
that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing
after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a traveller’s methodic
pace.
As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again came bearing
down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars,
and whatever else could be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks. Some
sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and
lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were
there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As with
Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his boat’s broken
half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so exhaust him as the
previous day’s mishap.
But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead
of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had
thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving
but one short sharp splinter.
“Aye, aye, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and
would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”
“The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up; I put good
work into that leg.”
“But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.
“Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.— But even with a broken
bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more me,
than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as
graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder

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floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?— Aloft there! which way?”
“Dead to leeward, sir.”
“Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare
boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat’s crews.”
“Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”
“Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the unconquer-
able captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”
“Sir?”
“My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that shivered
lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot
be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”
The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee
was not there.
“The Parsee!” cried Stubb—“he must have been caught in-”
“The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle—find
him—not gone—not gone!”
But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere
to be found.
“Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your line— I thought I saw
him dragging under.”
“My line! my line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?— What death-
knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon,
too!—toss over the litter there,— d’ye see it?—the forged iron, men, the white
whale’s—no, no, no,— blistered fool; this hand did dart it!—’tis in the fish!—Aloft
there! Keep him nailed-Quick!—all hands to the rigging of the boats— collect
the oars—harpooneers! the irons, the irons!—hoist the royals higher—a pull on
all the sheets!—helm there! steady, steady for your life! I’ll ten times girdle the
unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I’ll slay him yet!
“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck; “never, never
wilt thou capture him, old man— In Jesus’ name no more of this, that’s worse than
devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more
snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with
warnings:—what more wouldst thou have?— Shall we keep chasing this murderous
fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of
the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,— Impiety and
blasphemy to hunt him more!”
“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both
saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be
the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank.
Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by
thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant;
I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round
men, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance;
propped up on a lonely foot. ‘Tis Ahab—his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede,
that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half-stranded, as ropes that tow
dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack;
and till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye,
men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they
drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for

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evermore. So with Moby Dick—two days he’s floated—to-morrow will be the third.
Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but only to spout his last! D’ye feel brave men,
brave?”
“As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.
“And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he muttered
on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there,
concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others’ hearts
what’s clinched so fast in mine!— The Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he
was to go before:— but still was to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s that?—
There’s a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole
line of judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks my brain. I’ll, I’ll solve it, though!”
When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on the
previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the grindstone was
heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns in the complete and careful
rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their fresh weapons for the morrow.
Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made him
another leg; while still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his
scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due
eastward for the earliest sun.

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Chapter CXXXV
The Chase — Third Day

The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the solitary
night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the daylight look-outs,
who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
“In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. Helm there;
steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again! were it a
new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning
the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world.
Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only
feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God
only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a
calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm— frozen calm, this old
skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And
still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but
no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy
clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip
it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A
vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and
wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent
as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a
wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet,
’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has
the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a
coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single
blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind
but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all
these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most
special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and
swear it now, that there’s something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These
warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong
and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser
currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift
and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these
same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like
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them—something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along!

To it! Aloft there! What d’ye see?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye, aye,
it must be so. I’ve over-sailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he’s chasing me now;
not I, him— that’s bad; I might have known it, too. Fool! the lines— the harpoons
he’s towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About! about! Come down, all of
ye, but the regular look outs! Man the braces!”
Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s quarter,
so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon
the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake.
“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck to himself,
as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. “God keep us, but already my
bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I
disobey my God in obeying him!”
“Stand by to sway me up!” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. “We
should meet him soon.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” and straightway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and once more Ahab
swung on high.
A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held long
breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather bow,
Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads three
shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.
“Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there!—brace
sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck.
The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast,
and I must down. But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea;
there’s time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not
changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The
same—the same!— the same to Noah as to me. There’s a soft shower to leeward.
Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere— to something else than
common land, more palmy than the palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way;
look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old
mast-head! What’s this?—green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such
green weather stains on Ahab’s head! There’s the difference now between man’s old
age and matter’s. But aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls,
though are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that’s all. By heaven this dead wood
has the better of my live flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and I’ve known
some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff
of vital fathers. What’s that he said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet
to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I
descend those endless stairs? and all night I’ve been sailing from him, wherever he
did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching thyself,
O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good bye, mast-head—keep a good
eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when
the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail.”
He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the
cloven blue air to the deck.
In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s stern, Ahab

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just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the mate,—who held one of
the tackle—ropes on deck— and bade him pause.
“Starbuck!”
“Sir?”
“For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.”
“Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”
“Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!”
“Truth, sir: saddest truth.”
“Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I
feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands
with me, man.”
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a brave
man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”
“Lower away!”-cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by for the
crew!”
In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
“The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window there; “O
master, my master, come back!”
But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat
leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when numbers
of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously
snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this
way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening
to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following
them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching
regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been observed by
the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was
that Ahab’s crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh
more musky to the senses of the sharks— a matter sometimes well known to affect
them,—however it was, they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the
others.
“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following
with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?—lowering
thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase;
and this the critical third day?—For when three days flow together in one continuous
intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third
the evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what
is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,—fixed
at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and
skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl; thou fadest in pale glories
behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems
of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming? My
legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats it yet? Stir
thyself, Starbuck!— stave it off—move, move! speak aloud!—Mast-head there! See
ye my boy’s hand on the hill?—Crazed; aloft there!— keep thy keenest eye upon the
boats:—mark well the whale!— Ho! again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he
tears the vane”— pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck—“Ha, he soars

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away with it!—Where’s the old man now? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder,
shudder!”
The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads— a
downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to
be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways from the vessel;
the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-bent waves
hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.
“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in!
ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:—and
hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly
upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the
surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held
their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast
form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil
of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back
into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like
heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling
surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.
“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the
attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick
seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers
of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent
skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the
boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from
the two mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but
leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale
swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them
again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish’s
back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale
had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee
was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon
old Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand.
“Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye, Parsee! I see thee
again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst
promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse?
Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time,
and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down, men! the first thing that but
offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men,
but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.— Where’s the whale? gone down again?”
But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he
bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his
leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had
almost passed the ship,—which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to
him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming
with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path
in the sea.

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“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist.
See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”
Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to leeward,
by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near
as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as he leaned over the rail, he hailed him
to turn the vessel about, and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval.
Glancing upwards he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to
the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats
which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing
them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying
glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new
irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats;
far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now
marking that the vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to
Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a
hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.
Whether fagged by the three days’ running chase, and the resistance to his swim-
ming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent deceitfulness
and malice in him: whichever was true, the White Whale’s way now began to abate,
as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more; though indeed the
whale’s last start had not been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over
the waves the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to
the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged
and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip.
“Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on! ’tis the
better rest, the sharks’ jaw than the yielding water.”
“But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!”
“They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”— he muttered—“whether
these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive,
now—we near him. The helm! take the helm! let me pass,”—and so saying two of
the oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White
Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance—as the whale sometimes
will—and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from
the whale’s spout, curled round his great Monadnock hump; he was even thus close
to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As
both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick
sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without
staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the
elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have
been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen—who foreknew not the
precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects— these
were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale
again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard
again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.
Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous
swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried
out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded

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the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment
the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!
“What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in
upon him!”
Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round
to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the
nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecu-
tions; bethinking it—it may be—a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down
upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.
Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands! stretch out
before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?”
“The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen.
“Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea that ere it be for ever too late,
Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see: the ship! the ship! Dash
on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?”
But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-hammering
seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst through, and in an
instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its
half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring
water.
Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer re-
mained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a
plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart;
while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the
down-coming monster just as soon as he.
“The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now
hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman’s fainting fit. Up
helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers?
all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady.
Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives
on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!”
“Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help
Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever
helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own unwinking eye? And now poor
Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with
brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I
call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I
would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou
grinning whale, but there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For
me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over
salted death, though;—cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry
ere we die!”
“Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor
mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now come to her, for
the voyage is up.”
From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits
of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they
had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon
the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head,

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sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.

Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite
of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the
ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces.
Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like
necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down
a flume.
“The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat; “its wood
could only be American!”
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but
turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but
within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.
“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! Let me hear thy hammer. Oh!
ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied
hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death—glorious
ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of
meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my
topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds,
pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled
comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering
whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake
I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee,
though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity
the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it;
but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes
bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.
Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty
tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.
For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The ship? Great
God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her
sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost
masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty
perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea.
And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each
floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round
and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken
head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible,
together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical
coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red
arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing
the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had
followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking
at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept
its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously
feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept
his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and

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his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of
Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she
had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf
beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled
on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

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Chapter CXXXVI
Epilogue

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee”

Job.
The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?— Because one did
survive the wreck.
It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates
ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the
vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out
of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing
scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me,
I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had
subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards
the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another
Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst;
and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy,
rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over,
and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and
night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided
by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed
beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was
the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children,
only found another orphan.
ETYMOLOGY (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a
Grammar School)
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was
ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly
embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to
dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by
what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through igno-
rance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you
deliver that which is not true.”
—HACKLUYT
“WHALE. ... Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness
or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.”
—WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY
“WHALE. ... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger.
Wallen; A.S. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.”
—RICHARDSON’S DICTIONARY
KETOS, Greek.
CETUS, Latin.
WHOEL, Anglo-Saxon.
HVALT, Danish.
WAL, Dutch.
HWAL, Swedish.
WHALE, Icelandic.
WHALE, English.
BALEINE, French.
BALLENA, Spanish.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Erromangoan.
EXTRACTS
(Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian)
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor
devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls
of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find
in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. therefore you must not, in every case
at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these
extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors
generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or
entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously
said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations,
including our own.
So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm;
and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one
sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears;
and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether
unpleasant sadness— Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much more pains ye take
to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would
Moby-Dick 431

that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your
tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have
gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long
pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but
splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!
“And God created great whales.”
—GENESIS.
“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;
One would think the deep to be hoary.”
—JOB.
“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”
—JONAH.
“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made
to play therein.”
—PSALMS.
“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,
shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent;
and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”
—ISAIAH
“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this
monster’s mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that
foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.”
—HOLLAND’S PLUTARCH’S MORALS.
“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:
among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in
length as four acres or arpens of land.”
—HOLLAND’S PLINY.
“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the former,
one was of a most monstrous size. ... This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising
the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before him into a foam.”
—TOOKE’S LUCIAN. “THE TRUE HISTORY.”
“He visited this country also with a view of catching
horse-whales, which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he
brought some to the king. ... The best whales were catched in his own country, of
which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of six
who had killed sixty in two days.”
—OTHER OR OCTHER’S VERBAL NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN FROM
HIS MOUTH BY KING ALFRED, A.D. 890.
“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that
enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are immediately
lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security, and there
sleeps.”
—MONTAIGNE. — APOLOGY FOR RAIMOND SEBOND.
“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan
described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.”
—RABELAIS.
“This whale’s liver was two cartloads.”
—STOWE’S ANNALS.

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“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling
pan.”
—LORD BACON’S VERSION OF THE PSALMS.
“Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible quantity
of oil will be extracted out of one whale.”
—IBID. “HISTORY OF LIFE AND DEATH.”
“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward
bruise.”
—KING HENRY.
“Very like a whale.”
—HAMLET.
“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art
Mote him availle, but to returne againe
To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart,
Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the maine.”
—THE FAERIE QUEEN.
“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a
peaceful calm trouble the ocean til it boil.”
—SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. PREFACE TO GONDIBERT.
“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit.”
—SIR T. BROWNE. OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE.
VIDE HIS V. E.
“Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail
He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
...
Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears,
And on his back a grove of pikes appears.”
—WALLER’S BATTLE OF THE SUMMER ISLANDS.
“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or
State—(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.”
—OPENING SENTENCE OF HOBBES’S LEVIATHAN.
“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a
sprat in the mouth of a whale.”
—PILGRIM’S PROGRESS.
“That sea beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.”
—PARADISE LOST.
“There Leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land; and at his gills
Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.”
—IBID.
“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of
oil swimming in them.”

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Moby-Dick 433

—FULLLER’S PROFANE AND HOLY STATE.

“So close behind some promontory lie
The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,
And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.”
—DRYDEN’S ANNUS MIRABILIS.
“While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut
off his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will
be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water.”
—THOMAS EDGE’S TEN VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS.
“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature
has placed on their shoulders.”
—SIR T. HERBERT’S VOYAGES INTO ASIA AND AFRICA. HARRIS COLL.
“Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced
to proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship upon
them.”
—SCHOUTEN’S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION.
“We set sail from the Elbe, wind N. E. in the ship called The
Jonas-in-the-Whale. ...
Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but that is a fable. ...
They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a
whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains. ...
I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel
of herrings in his belly. ...
One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in
Spitzbergen that was white all over.”
—A VOYAGE TO GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.
“Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was informed),
besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of baleen. The jaws of it stand
for a gate in the garden of Pitferren.”
—SIBBALD’S FIFE AND KINROSS.
“Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed by
any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness.”
—RICHARD STRAFFORD’S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS.
A.D. 1668.
“Whales in the sea
God’s voice obey.”
—N. E. PRIMER.
“We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the northward
of us.”
—CAPTAIN COWLEY’S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D. 1729.
“... and the breath of the whale is frequendy attended with
such an insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.”
—ULLOA’S SOUTH AMERICA.
“To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,

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We trust the important charge, the petticoat.

Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
Tho’ stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.”
—RAPE OF THE LOCK.
“If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that
take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemptible in
the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest animal in creation.”
—GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.
“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make
them speak like great wales.”
—GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.
“In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it
was found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then
towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in
order to avoid being seen by us.”
—COOK’S VOYAGES.
“The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in
so great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to mention
even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and some other articles
of the same nature in their boats, in order to terrify and prevent their too near
approach.”
—UNO VON TROIL’S LETTERS ON BANKS’S AND SOLANDER’S
VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772.
“The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON’S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINIS-
TER IN 1778.
“And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?”
—EDMUND BURKE’S REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET
WHALE-FISHERY.
“Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.”
—EDMUND BURKE. (SOMEWHERE.)
“A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue, said to be
grounded on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from
pirates and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And
these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the
king.”
—BLACKSTONE.
“Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
Rodmond unerring o’er his head suspends
The barbed steel, and every turn attends.”
—FALCONER’S SHIPWRECK.
“Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,
And rockets blew self driven,
To hang their momentary fire
Around the vault of heaven.
“So fire with water to compare,
The ocean serves on high,
Up-spouted by a whale in air,

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Moby-Dick 435

To express unwieldy joy.”

—COWPER, ON THE QUEEN’S VISIT TO LONDON.
“Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a
stroke, with immense velocity.”
—JOHN HUNTER’S ACCOUNT OF THE DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A
SMALL SIZED ONE.)
“The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of
the water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through
that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing from the whale’s
heart.”
—PALEY’S THEOLOGY.
“The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.”
—BARON CUVIER.
“In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take
any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them.”
—COLNETT’S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMA-
CETI
WHALE FISHERY.
“In the free element beneath me swam,
Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
Fishes of every color, form, and kind;
Which language cannot paint, and mariner
Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
To insect millions peopling every wave:
Gather’d in shoals immense, like floating islands,
Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
And trackless region, though on every side
Assaulted by voracious enemies,
Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm’d in front or jaw,
With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.”
—MONTGOMERY’S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD.
“Io! Paean! Io! sing.
To the finny people’s king.
Not a mightier whale than this
In the vast Atlantic is;
Not a fatter fish than he,
Flounders round the Polar Sea.”
—CHARLES LAMB’S TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE.
“In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the
whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed: there—pointing
to the sea—is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.”
—OBED MACY’S HISTORY OF NANTUCKET.
“I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the
form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.”
—HAWTHORNE’S TWICE TOLD TALES.
“She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been
killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.”
—IBID.
“No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he

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Moby-Dick 436

threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. He’s
a raal oil-butt, that fellow!”
—COOPER’S PILOT.
“The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
whales had been introduced on the stage there.”
—ECKERMANN’S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.
“My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “we have been
stove by a whale.”
—“NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF
NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY
A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN.” BY OWEN
CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL. NEW
YORK, 1821.
“A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
The wind was piping free;
Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
As it floundered in the sea.”
—ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.
“The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of this
one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six English miles. ...
“Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.”
—SCORESBY.
“Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and
with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats
with his head; they are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes
utterly destroyed.
... It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of
the habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an
animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should
have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and the most
convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.”
—THOMAS BEALE’S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.
“The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the True
Whale” (Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable weapon at either
extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a disposition to employ these
weapons offensively and in manner at once so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to
lead to its being regarded as the most dangerous to attack of all the known species
of the whale tribe.”
—FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT’S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE
GLOBE, 1840.
October 13. “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head.
“Where away?” demanded the captain.
“Three points off the lee bow, sir.”
“Raise up your wheel. Steady!”
“Steady, sir.”

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Moby-Dick 437

“Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?”

“Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she
breaches!”
“Sing out! sing out every time!”
“Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there—there—thar she blows -bowes
-bo-o-os!”
“How far off?”
“Two miles and a half.”
“Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands.”
—J. ROSS BROWNE’S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE. 1846.
“The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the
horrid transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of Nantucket.”
—“NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE,” BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS. A.D.
1828.
Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length rushed on
the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping into the water when
they saw the onset was inevitable.”
—MISSIONARY JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT.
“Nantucket itself,” said Mr. Webster, “is a very striking and
peculiar portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine
thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to the National
wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry.”
—REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER’S SPEECH IN THE U. S. SENATE,
ON THE APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NAN-
TUCKET. 1828.
“The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a
moment.”
—“THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN’S
ADVENTURES AND THE WHALE’S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE
HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE COMMODORE PREBLE.”
BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.
“If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will
send you to hell.”
—LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS
BROTHER, WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER VERSION OF THE
WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE.
“The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in
order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they failed of
their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.”
—MCCULLOCH’S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.
“These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound
forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen
seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West Passage.”
—FROM “SOMETHING” UNPUBLISHED.
“It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being
struck by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at the
mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a totally different
air from those engaged in regular voyage.”

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Moby-Dick 438

—CURRENTS AND WHALING. U. S. EX. EX.

“Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form arches
over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have been told that
these were the ribs of whales.”
—TALES OF A WHALE VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.
“It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these
whales, that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages enrolled
among the crew.”
—NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND RETAKING OF THE
WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.
“It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they departed.”
—CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.
“Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
perpendicularly into the air. It was the while.”
—MIRIAM COFFIN OR THE WHALE FISHERMAN.
“The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied to the
root of his tail.”
—A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND TRUCKS.
“On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably
male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone’s
throw of the shore” (Terra Del Fuego), “over which the beech tree extended its
branches.”
—DARWIN’S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST.
“‘Stern all!’ exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw
the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat, threat-
ening it with instant destruction;—‘Stern all, for your lives!’”
—WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.
“So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,
While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!”
—NANTUCKET SONG.
“Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right,
And King of the boundless sea.”
—WHALE SONG.

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Moby-Dick 439

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