trainEN.txt

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
ignorance, 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 the more
pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for
ever go thankless!  Would 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!
EXTRACTS.
"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.
"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." --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,
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 MINISTER 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,
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 SPERMACETI WHALE
FISHERY.
"In the free element beneath me swam,
Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
Fishes of every colour, 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
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."
"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 NANTUCKET.
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." --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, threatening 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.
CHAPTER 1
Loomings.
Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago--never mind how long
precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing
particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a
little and see the watery part of the world.  It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.  Whenever I
find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,
drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily
pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every
funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper
hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me
from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon
as I can.  This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a
philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly
take to the ship.  There is nothing surprising in this.  If they but
knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish
very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with
her surf.  Right and left, the streets take you waterward.  Its
extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by
waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of
sight of land.  Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.  Go from
Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall,
northward.  What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around
the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean
reveries.  Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the
pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some
high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better
seaward peep.  But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in
lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to
desks.  How then is this?  Are the green fields gone?  What do they
here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
seemingly bound for a dive.  Strange!  Nothing will content them but
the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of
yonder warehouses will not suffice.  No.  They must get just as nigh
the water as they possibly can without falling in.  And there they
stand--miles of them--leagues.  Inlanders all, they come from lanes
and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west.  Yet
here they all unite.  Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the
needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more.  Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes.
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down
in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.  There is
magic in it.  Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his
deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going,
and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all
that region.  Should you ever be athirst in the great American
desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied
with a metaphysical professor.  Yes, as every one knows, meditation
and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist.  He desires to paint you the dreamiest,
shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all
the valley of the Saco.  What is the chief element he employs?  There
stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a
crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his
cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.  Deep into
distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of
mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.  But though the picture
lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs
like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.  Go visit
the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade
knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm
wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there!  Were Niagara
but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see
it?  Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two
handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he
sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway
Beach?  Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy
soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?  Why upon your
first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical
vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of
sight of land?  Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?  Why did
the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?  Surely
all this is not without meaning.  And still deeper the meaning of
that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the
tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and
was drowned.  But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and
oceans.  It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this
is the key to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I
begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of
my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as
a passenger.  For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse,
and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.  Besides,
passengers get sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do
not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a
passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea
as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.  I abandon the glory and
distinction of such offices to those who like them.  For my part, I
abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations
of every kind whatsoever.  It is quite as much as I can do to take
care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs,
schooners, and what not.  And as for going as cook,--though I confess
there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer
on ship-board--yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;--though
once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and
peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to
say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.  It is out of the
idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted
river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their
huge bake-houses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow.  And at first, this sort of
thing is unpleasant enough.  It touches one's sense of honour,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land,
the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.  And more than
all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have
been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys
stand in awe of you.  The transition is a keen one, I assure you,
from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of
Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.  But even
this wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a
broom and sweep down the decks?  What does that indignity amount to,
weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?  Do you think
the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I
promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular
instance?  Who ain't a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, however the
old sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch
me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right;
that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same
way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and
so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each
other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single
penny that I ever heard of.  On the contrary, passengers themselves
must pay.  And there is all the difference in the world between
paying and being paid.  The act of paying is perhaps the most
uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon
us.  But BEING PAID,--what will compare with it?  The urbane activity
with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering
that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly
ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.  Ah! how
cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome
exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck.  For as in this world,
head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if
you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the
Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from
the sailors on the forecastle.  He thinks he breathes it first; but
not so.  In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in
many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect
it.  But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea
as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a
whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who
has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and
influences me in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than
any one else.  And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage,
formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a
long time ago.  It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo
between more extensive performances.  I take it that this part of the
bill must have run something like this:
"GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers,
the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when
others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and
short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in
farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I
recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the
springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under
various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did,
besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting
from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great
whale himself.  Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all
my curiosity.  Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his
island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these,
with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and
sounds, helped to sway me to my wish.  With other men, perhaps, such
things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented
with an everlasting itch for things remote.  I love to sail forbidden
seas, and land on barbarous coasts.  Not ignoring what is good, I am
quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would
they let me--since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all
the inmates of the place one lodges in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the
great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild
conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into
my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of
them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
CHAPTER 2
The Carpet-Bag.
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my
arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific.  Quitting the good
city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford.  It was a
Saturday night in December.  Much was I disappointed upon learning
that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no
way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop
at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as
well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing.  For my
mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because
there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected
with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.  Besides
though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the
business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is
now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original--the Tyre
of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was
stranded.  Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal
whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the
Leviathan?  And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first
adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
cobblestones--so goes the story--to throw at the whales, in order to
discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the
bowsprit?
Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before
me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it
became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep
meanwhile.  It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and
dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless.  I knew no one in the
place.  With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only
brought up a few pieces of silver,--So, wherever you go, Ishmael,
said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street
shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with
the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you may
conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire
the price, and don't be too particular.
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The
Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there.
Further on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn,"
there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the
packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the
congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic
pavement,--rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the
flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles
of my boots were in a most miserable plight.  Too expensive and
jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare
in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within.
But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away from
before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way.  So on I
went.  I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward,
for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either
hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a
tomb.  At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that
quarter of the town proved all but deserted.  But presently I came to
a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which
stood invitingly open.  It had a careless look, as if it were meant
for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was
to stumble over an ash-box in the porch.  Ha! thought I, ha, as the
flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that
destroyed city, Gomorrah?  But "The Crossed Harpoons," and "The
Sword-Fish?"--this, then must needs be the sign of "The Trap."
However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed
on and opened a second, interior door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet.  A hundred
black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black
Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit.  It was a negro church;
and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the
weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.  Ha, Ishmael, muttered
I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the
docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a
swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly
representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words
underneath--"The Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin."
Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather ominous in that particular connexion,
thought I.  But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I
suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.  As the light
looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and
the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have
been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the
swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought
that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea
coffee.
It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side
palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly.  It stood on a sharp
bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse
howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft.  Euroclydon,
nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with
his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed.  "In judging of that
tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose
works I possess the only copy extant--"it maketh a marvellous
difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where
the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from
that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which
the wight Death is the only glazier."  True enough, thought I, as
this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou reasonest
well.  Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the
house.  What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies
though, and thrust in a little lint here and there.  But it's too
late to make any improvements now.  The universe is finished; the
copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.
Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for
his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might
plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and
yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon.  Euroclydon!
says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one
afterwards) pooh, pooh!  What a fine frosty night; how Orion
glitters; what northern lights!  Let them talk of their oriental
summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of
making my own summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus?  Can he warm his blue hands by holding them
up to the grand northern lights?  Would not Lazarus rather be in
Sumatra than here?  Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise
along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit
itself, in order to keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before
the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should
be moored to one of the Moluccas.  Yet Dives himself, he too lives
like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a
president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of
orphans.
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there
is plenty of that yet to come.  Let us scrape the ice from our
frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.
CHAPTER 3
The Spouter-Inn.
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.  On one side hung a very
large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced,
that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only
by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and
careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an
understanding of its purpose.  Such unaccountable masses of shades
and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young
artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to
delineate chaos bewitched.  But by dint of much and earnest
contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by
throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at
last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might
not be altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,
portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the
picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
nameless yeast.  A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to
drive a nervous man distracted.  Yet was there a sort of indefinite,
half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you
to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out
what that marvellous painting meant.  Ever and anon a bright, but,
alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.--It's the Black Sea in a
midnight gale.--It's the unnatural combat of the four primal
elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a Hyperborean winter
scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.  But at
last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in
the picture's midst.  THAT once found out, and all the rest were
plain.  But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic
fish? even the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with
whom I conversed upon the subject.  The picture represents a
Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering
there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an
exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in
the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish
array of monstrous clubs and spears.  Some were thickly set with
glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots
of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping
round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed
mower.  You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous
cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such
a hacking, horrifying implement.  Mixed with these were rusty old
whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed.  Some were
storied weapons.  With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed,
fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a
sunrise and a sunset.  And that harpoon--so like a corkscrew now--was
flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards
slain off the Cape of Blanco.  The original iron entered nigh the
tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man,
travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the
hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut
through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
fireplaces all round--you enter the public room.  A still duskier
place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old
wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some
old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this
corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously.  On one side stood a
long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled
with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks.
Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking
den--the bar--a rude attempt at a right whale's head.  Be that how it
may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a
coach might almost drive beneath it.  Within are shabby shelves,
ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws
of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed
they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their
money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison.  Though
true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses
deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom.  Parallel
meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads'
goblets.  Fill to THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS
a penny more; and so on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure,
which you may gulp down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered
about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of
SKRIMSHANDER.  I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be
accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was
full--not a bed unoccupied.  "But avast," he added, tapping his
forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket,
have ye?  I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd better get used
to that sort of thing."
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should
ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and
that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the
harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander
further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up
with the half of any decent man's blanket.
"I thought so.  All right; take a seat.  Supper?--you want supper?
Supper'll be ready directly."
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on
the Battery.  At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning
it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at
the space between his legs.  He was trying his hand at a ship under
full sail, but he didn't make much headway, I thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an
adjoining room.  It was cold as Iceland--no fire at all--the landlord
said he couldn't afford it.  Nothing but two dismal tallow candles,
each in a winding sheet.  We were fain to button up our monkey
jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half
frozen fingers.  But the fare was of the most substantial kind--not
only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for
supper!  One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to
these dumplings in a most direful manner.
"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead
sartainty."
"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"
"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the
harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap.  He never eats dumplings, he
don't--he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."
"The devil he does," says I.  "Where is that harpooneer?  Is he
here?"
"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark
complexioned" harpooneer.  At any rate, I made up my mind that if it
so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get
into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not
what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the
evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without.  Starting up, the
landlord cried, "That's the Grampus's crew.  I seed her reported in
the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship.
Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung
open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough.  Enveloped in
their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen
comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with
icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.  They had
just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they
entered.  No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the
whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there
officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round.  One complained
of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like
potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for
all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing,
or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side
of an ice-island.
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even
with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began
capering about most obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though
he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his
own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much
noise as the rest.  This man interested me at once; and since the
sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though
but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned),
I will here venture upon a little description of him.  He stood full
six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a
coffer-dam.  I have seldom seen such brawn in a man.  His face was
deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the
contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some
reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.  His voice at
once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I
thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the
Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia.  When the revelry of his companions
had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I
saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea.  In a few
minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it
seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry
of "Bulkington!  Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of
the house in pursuit of him.
It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost
supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate
myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to
the entrance of the seamen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed.  In fact, you would a good deal
rather not sleep with your own brother.  I don't know how it is, but
people like to be private when they are sleeping.  And when it comes
to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange
town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections
indefinitely multiply.  Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a
sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors
no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore.  To
be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your
own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in
your own skin.
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
thought of sleeping with him.  It was fair to presume that being a
harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be
of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest.  I began to twitch all
over.  Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought
to be home and going bedwards.  Suppose now, he should tumble in upon
me at midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been
coming?
"Landlord!  I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't
sleep with him.  I'll try the bench here."
"Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a
mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots
and notches.  "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's
plane there in the bar--wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough."
So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief
first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed,
the while grinning like an ape.  The shavings flew right and left;
till at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot.
The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for
heaven's sake to quit--the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did
not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a
pine plank.  So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and
throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went
about his business, and left me in a brown study.
I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too
short; but that could be mended with a chair.  But it was a foot too
narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher
than the planed one--so there was no yoking them.  I then placed the
first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall,
leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in.
But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me
from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at
all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one
from the window, and both together formed a series of small
whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought
to spend the night.
The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I
steal a march on him--bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed,
not to be wakened by the most violent knockings?  It seemed no bad
idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it.  For who could tell
but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the
harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me
down!
Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of
spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I
began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable
prejudices against this unknown harpooneer.  Thinks I, I'll wait
awhile; he must be dropping in before long.  I'll have a good look at
him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after
all--there's no telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and
threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
"Landlord! said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep
such late hours?"  It was now hard upon twelve o'clock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be
mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension.  "No," he
answered, "generally he's an early bird--airley to bed and airley to
rise--yes, he's the bird what catches the worm.  But to-night he
went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him
so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."
"Can't sell his head?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you
are telling me?" getting into a towering rage.  "Do you pretend to
say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed
Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around
this town?"
"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't
sell it here, the market's overstocked."
"With what?" shouted I.
"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"
"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better
stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."
"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I
rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a
slanderin' his head."
"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at
this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.
"It's broke a'ready," said he.
"Broke," said I--"BROKE, do you mean?"
"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."
"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snow-storm--"landlord, stop whittling.  You and I must understand one
another, and that too without delay.  I come to your house and want a
bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half
belongs to a certain harpooneer.  And about this harpooneer, whom I
have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and
exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling
towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of
connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the
highest degree.  I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and
what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe
to spend the night with him.  And in the first place, you will be so
good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I
take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've
no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean,
landlord, YOU, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would
thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution."
"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty
long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then.  But be easy,
be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just
arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New
Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but
one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's
Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the
streets when folks is goin' to churches.  He wanted to, last Sunday,
but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the door with four
heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions."
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and
showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling
me--but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who
stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged
in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."
"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder.  "But come, it's getting
dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes--it's a nice bed;
Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced.  There's
plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty
big bed that.  Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and
little Johnny in the foot of it.  But I got a dreaming and sprawling
about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came
near breaking his arm.  Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do.  Come
along here, I'll give ye a glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he lighted
a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead the way.  But I
stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed
"I vum it's Sunday--you won't see that harpooneer to-night; he's come
to anchor somewhere--come along then; DO come; WON'T ye come?"
I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I
was ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure
enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four
harpooneers to sleep abreast.
"There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea
chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; "there,
make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye."  I turned
round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed.  Though none of
the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well.  I then
glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table,
could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude
shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man
striking a whale.  Of things not properly belonging to the room,
there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one
corner; also a large seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's
wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk.  Likewise, there was a
parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the
fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.
But what is this on the chest?  I took it up, and held it close to
the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to
arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it.  I can compare
it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with
little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills
round an Indian moccasin.  There was a hole or slit in the middle of
this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos.  But could
it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat,
and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise?
I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being
uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though
this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day.  I
went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never
saw such a sight in my life.  I tore myself out of it in such a hurry
that I gave myself a kink in the neck.
I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat.  After thinking some time
on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then
stood in the middle of the room thinking.  I then took off my coat,
and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves.  But beginning to feel
very cold now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what the
landlord said about the harpooneer's not coming home at all that
night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of
my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into
bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven.
Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery,
there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not
sleep for a long time.  At last I slid off into a light doze, and had
pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I
heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light
come into the room from under the door.
Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
head-peddler.  But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a
word till spoken to.  Holding a light in one hand, and that identical
New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and
without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off
from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away at
the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the
room.  I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted
for some time while employed in unlacing the bag's mouth.  This
accomplished, however, he turned round--when, good heavens! what a
sight!  Such a face!  It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here
and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares.  Yes, it's
just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow; he's been in a fight,
got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon.  But at
that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I
plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black
squares on his cheeks.  They were stains of some sort or other.  At
first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the
truth occurred to me.  I remembered a story of a white man--a
whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by
them.  I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant
voyages, must have met with a similar adventure.  And what is it,
thought I, after all!  It's only his outside; a man can be honest in
any sort of skin.  But then, what to make of his unearthly
complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and
completely independent of the squares of tattooing.  To be sure, it
might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never
heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one.
However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun
there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin.  Now, while
all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this
harpooneer never noticed me at all.  But, after some difficulty
having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently
pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair
on.  Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he
then took the New Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed
it down into the bag.  He now took off his hat--a new beaver
hat--when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise.  There was no
hair on his head--none to speak of at least--nothing but a small
scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead.  His bald purplish head now
looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.  Had not the stranger
stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker
than ever I bolted a dinner.
Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window,
but it was the second floor back.  I am no coward, but what to make
of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my
comprehension.  Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely
nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as
much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken
into my room at the dead of night.  In fact, I was so afraid of him
that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a
satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last
showed his chest and arms.  As I live, these covered parts of him
were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was
all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty
Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.
Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green
frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.  It was now quite
plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard
of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian
country.  I quaked to think of it.  A peddler of heads too--perhaps
the heads of his own brothers.  He might take a fancy to
mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!
But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me
that he must indeed be a heathen.  Going to his heavy grego, or
wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he
fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little
deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a
three days' old Congo baby.  Remembering the embalmed head, at first
I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved
in some similar manner.  But seeing that it was not at all limber,
and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded
that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to
be.  For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing
the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like
a tenpin, between the andirons.  The chimney jambs and all the bricks
inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very
appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.
I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but
ill at ease meantime--to see what was next to follow.  First he takes
about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and
places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship
biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the
shavings into a sacrificial blaze.  Presently, after many hasty
snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers
(whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded
in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a
little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro.  But the
little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he
never moved his lips.  All these strange antics were accompanied by
still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be
praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other,
during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner.
At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very
unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as
carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.
All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and
seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business
operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,
now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in
which I had so long been bound.
But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal
one.  Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of
it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth
at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke.  The next
moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk
between his teeth, sprang into bed with me.  I sang out, I could not
help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began
feeling me.
Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again.  But
his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill
comprehended my meaning.
"Who-e debel you?"--he at last said--"you no speak-e, dam-me, I
kill-e."  And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about
me in the dark.
"Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I.  "Landlord!
Watch!  Coffin!  Angels! save me!"
"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled
the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered
the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on
fire.  But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the
room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here
wouldn't harm a hair of your head."
"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that
that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"
"I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads
around town?--but turn flukes again and go to sleep.  Queequeg, look
here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"
"Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
sitting up in bed.
"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and
throwing the clothes to one side.  He really did this in not only a
civil but a really kind and charitable way.  I stood looking at him a
moment.  For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely
looking cannibal.  What's all this fuss I have been making about,
thought I to myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has
just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe,
or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I
will turn in with him.  But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed
with me.  It's dangerous.  Besides, I ain't insured."
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to one side as much as to
say--I won't touch a leg of ye."
"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
CHAPTER 4
The Counterpane.
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm
thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.  You had
almost thought I had been his wife.  The counterpane was of
patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles;
and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan
labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise
shade--owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically
in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various
times--this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a
strip of that same patchwork quilt.  Indeed, partly lying on it as
the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the
quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the
sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was
hugging me.
My sensations were strange.  Let me try to explain them.  When I was
a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell
me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely
settle.  The circumstance was this.  I had been cutting up some caper
or other--I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had
seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who,
somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed
supperless,--my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and
packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon
of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere.  I
felt dreadfully.  But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went
to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as
possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the
sheets.
I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must
elapse before I could hope for a resurrection.  Sixteen hours in bed!
the small of my back ached to think of it.  And it was so light too;
the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in
the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house.  I felt
worse and worse--at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in
my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw
myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a
good slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning
me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time.  But she was the
best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to
my room.  For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great
deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest
subsequent misfortunes.  At last I must have fallen into a troubled
nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it--half steeped in
dreams--I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped
in outer darkness.  Instantly I felt a shock running through all my
frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a
supernatural hand seemed placed in mine.  My arm hung over the
counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom,
to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side.
For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most
awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that
if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be
broken.  I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from
me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and
for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding
attempts to explain the mystery.  Nay, to this very hour, I often
puzzle myself with it.
Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the
supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness,
to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan
arm thrown round me.  But at length all the past night's events
soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only
alive to the comical predicament.  For though I tried to move his
arm--unlock his bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still
hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.
I now strove to rouse him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer was a
snore.  I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a
horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch.  Throwing aside the
counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as
if it were a hatchet-faced baby.  A pretty pickle, truly, thought I;
abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a
tomahawk!  "Queequeg!--in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!"  At
length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant
expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male
in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt;
and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a
Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a
pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not
altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning
over him.  Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious
misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a
creature.  When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the
character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to
the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and
sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress
first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole
apartment to myself.  Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances,
this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages
have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous
how essentially polite they are.  I pay this particular compliment to
Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and
consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him
from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my
curiosity getting the better of my breeding.  Nevertheless, a man
like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well
worth unusual regarding.
He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall
one, by the by, and then--still minus his trowsers--he hunted up his
boots.  What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his
next movement was to crush himself--boots in hand, and hat on--under
the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I
inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of
propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private
when putting on his boots.  But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature
in the transition stage--neither caterpillar nor butterfly.  He was
just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest
possible manners.  His education was not yet completed.  He was an
undergraduate.  If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very
probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then,
if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of
getting under the bed to put them on.  At last, he emerged with his
hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began
creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed
to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones--probably not made
to order either--rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off
of a bitter cold morning.
Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the
street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view
into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that
Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots
on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet
somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as
possible.  He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself.  At that
time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but
Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his
ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands.  He then donned his
waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand
centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face.
I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he
takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden
stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and
striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous
scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks.  Thinks I, Queequeg,
this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance.  Afterwards I
wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of what fine
steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the
long straight edges are always kept.
The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out
of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and
sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton.
CHAPTER 5
Breakfast.
I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted
the grinning landlord very pleasantly.  I cherished no malice towards
him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter
of my bedfellow.
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a
good thing; the more's the pity.  So, if any one man, in his own
proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not
be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be
spent in that way.  And the man that has anything bountifully
laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you
perhaps think for.
The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in
the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at.
They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and
third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea
blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny
company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing
monkey jackets for morning gowns.
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore.
This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue,
and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three
days landed from his Indian voyage.  That man next him looks a few
shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him.  In
the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly
bleached withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore.  But
who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various
tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one
array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.
"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we
went to breakfast.
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at
ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company.  Not always, though:
Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch
one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor.
But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as
Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach,
in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's
performances--this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best
mode of attaining a high social polish.  Still, for the most part,
that sort of thing is to be had anywhere.
These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that
after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear
some good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly
every man maintained a profound silence.  And not only that, but they
looked embarrassed.  Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom
without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the
high seas--entire strangers to them--and duelled them dead without
winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table--all of
the same calling, all of kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly
at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some
sheepfold among the Green Mountains.  A curious sight; these bashful
bears, these timid warrior whalemen!
But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--at the head
of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle.  To be sure I
cannot say much for his breeding.  His greatest admirer could not
have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with
him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table
with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the
beefsteaks towards him.  But THAT was certainly very coolly done by
him, and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do
anything coolly is to do it genteelly.
We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he
eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to
beefsteaks, done rare.  Enough, that when breakfast was over he
withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted his
tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking
with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.
CHAPTER 6
The Street.
If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a
civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first
daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will
frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from
foreign parts.  Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean
mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies.  Regent Street
is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo
Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives.  But New Bedford
beats all Water Street and Wapping.  In these last-mentioned haunts
you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand
chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry
on their bones unholy flesh.  It makes a stranger stare.
But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans,
Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the
whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see
other sights still more curious, certainly more comical.  There
weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New
Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.  They
are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled
forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance.
Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came.  In some
things you would think them but a few hours old.  Look there! that
chap strutting round the corner.  He wears a beaver hat and
swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife.
Here comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak.
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one--I mean a
downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his
two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.  Now when
a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a
distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you
should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport.  In
bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats;
straps to his canvas trowsers.  Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will
burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven,
straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.
But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals,
and bumpkins to show her visitors.  Not at all.  Still New Bedford is
a queer place.  Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land
would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast
of Labrador.  As it is, parts of her back country are enough to
frighten one, they look so bony.  The town itself is perhaps the
dearest place to live in, in all New England.  It is a land of oil,
true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine.
The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave
them with fresh eggs.  Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America
will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more
opulent, than in New Bedford.  Whence came they? how planted upon
this once scraggy scoria of a country?
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
mansion, and your question will be answered.  Yes; all these brave
houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and
Indian oceans.  One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up
hither from the bottom of the sea.  Can Herr Alexander perform a feat
like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.
You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they
say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night
recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples--long
avenues of green and gold.  And in August, high in air, the beautiful
and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by
their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms.  So omnipotent
is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced
bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside
at creation's final day.
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses.
But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their
cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens.  Elsewhere
match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell
me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell
them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous
Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.
CHAPTER 7
The Chapel.
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few
are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or
Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot.  I am sure that
I did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
special errand.  The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to
driving sleet and mist.  Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the
cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.
Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and
sailors' wives and widows.  A muffled silence reigned, only broken at
times by the shrieks of the storm.  Each silent worshipper seemed
purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were
insular and incommunicable.  The chaplain had not yet arrived; and
there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing
several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on
either side the pulpit.  Three of them ran something like the
following, but I do not pretend to quote:--
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
JOHN TALBOT,
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard,
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY HIS
SISTER.
_____________
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY,
NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY,
AND SAMUEL GLEIG,
Forming one of the boats' crews
OF
THE SHIP ELIZA
Who were towed out of sight by a Whale,
On the Off-shore Ground in the
PACIFIC,
December 31st, 1839.
THIS MARBLE
Is here placed by their surviving
SHIPMATES.
_____________
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
The late
CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY,
Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a
Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,
AUGUST 3d, 1833.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY
HIS WIDOW.
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated
myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see
Queequeg near me.  Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was
a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance.  This
savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance;
because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was
not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall.  Whether any of
the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among
the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded
accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present
wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief,
that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose
unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically
caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing
among flowers can say--here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the
desolation that broods in bosoms like these.  What bitter blanks in
those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes!  What despair in
those immovable inscriptions!  What deadly voids and unbidden
infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and
refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished
without a grave.  As well might those tablets stand in the cave of
Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;
why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no
tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it
is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we
prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle
him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth;
why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon
immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly,
hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries
ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we
nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the
living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a
knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.  All these things are
not without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these
dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky
light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who
had gone before me.  Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine.  But
somehow I grew merry again.  Delightful inducements to embark, fine
chance for promotion, it seems--aye, a stove boat will make me an
immortal by brevet.  Yes, there is death in this business of
whaling--a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into
Eternity.  But what then?  Methinks we have hugely mistaken this
matter of Life and Death.  Methinks that what they call my shadow
here on earth is my true substance.  Methinks that in looking at
things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun
through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.  In fact take
my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.  And therefore three
cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they
will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
CHAPTER 8
The Pulpit.
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back
upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the
congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the
chaplain.  Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the
whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite.  He had been a
sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had
dedicated his life to the ministry.  At the time I now write of,
Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort
of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for
among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild
gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure peeping forth
even beneath February's snow.  No one having previously heard his
history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the
utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical
peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life
he had led.  When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella,
and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran
down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed
almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had
absorbed.  However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one
removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when,
arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the
floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the
architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and
finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular
side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea.
The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome
pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself
nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole
contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no
means in bad taste.  Halting for an instant at the foot of the
ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the
man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly
sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted
the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case
with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were
of wood, so that at every step there was a joint.  At my first
glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient
for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary.
For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height,
slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up
the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving
him impregnable in his little Quebec.
I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and
sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any
mere tricks of the stage.  No, thought I, there must be some sober
reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something
unseen.  Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he
signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward
worldly ties and connexions?  Yes, for replenished with the meat and
wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is
a self-containing stronghold--a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a
perennial well of water within the walls.
But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,
borrowed from the chaplain's former sea-farings.  Between the marble
cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its
back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship
beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and
snowy breakers.  But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling
clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed
forth an angel's face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of
radiance upon the ship's tossed deck, something like that silver
plate now inserted into the Victory's plank where Nelson fell.  "Ah,
noble ship," the angel seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou noble
ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the
clouds are rolling off--serenest azure is at hand."
Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that
had achieved the ladder and the picture.  Its panelled front was in
the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a
projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's
fiddle-headed beak.
What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this
earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit
leads the world.  From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is
first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt.  From
thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for
favourable winds.  Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not
a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
CHAPTER 9
The Sermon.
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority
ordered the scattered people to condense.  "Starboard gangway,
there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard!
Midships! midships!"
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a
still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again,
and every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his
large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and
offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying
at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of
a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--in such tones he
commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and
joy--
"The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
And lift me deepening down to doom.
"I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell--
Oh, I was plunging to despair.
"In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints--
No more the whale did me confine.
"With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.
"My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power.
Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
howling of the storm.  A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly
turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand
down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last
verse of the first chapter of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great
fish to swallow up Jonah.'"
"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is
one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures.
Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a
pregnant lesson to us is this prophet!  What a noble thing is that
canticle in the fish's belly!  How billow-like and boisterously
grand!  We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the
kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is
about us!  But WHAT is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches?
Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful
men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.  As sinful men,
it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin,
hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment,
repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah.
As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in
his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never mind now what
that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard command.
But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to
do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors
to persuade.  And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it
is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God
consists.
"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at
God, by seeking to flee from Him.  He thinks that a ship made by men
will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the
Captains of this earth.  He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and
seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish.  There lurks, perhaps, a
hitherto unheeded meaning here.  By all accounts Tarshish could have
been no other city than the modern Cadiz.  That's the opinion of
learned men.  And where is Cadiz, shipmates?  Cadiz is in Spain; as
far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in
those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.
Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly
coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more
than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the
Straits of Gibraltar.  See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought
to flee world-wide from God?  Miserable man!  Oh! most contemptible
and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking
from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar
hastening to cross the seas.  So disordered, self-condemning is his
look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere
suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a
deck.  How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box,
valise, or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf with
their adieux.  At last, after much dodging search, he finds the
Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps
on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the
moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil
eye.  Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and
confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile.  Strong intuitions of
the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent.  In their gamesome
but still serious way, one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed
a widow;" or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry
lad, I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or
belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom."  Another runs to
read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which
the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the
apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of his
person.  He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his
sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their
hands upon him.  Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his
boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward.  He will
not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion.
So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be
the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into
the cabin.
"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?'  Oh! how that harmless
question mangles Jonah!  For the instant he almost turns to flee
again.  But he rallies.  'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish;
how soon sail ye, sir?'  Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up
to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he
hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.  'We
sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still
intently eyeing him.  'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any honest
man that goes a passenger.'  Ha!  Jonah, that's another stab.  But he
swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent.  'I'll sail with
ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--I'll pay now.'
For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not
to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere
the craft did sail.  And taken with the context, this is full of
meaning.
"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects
crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely,
and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at
all frontiers.  So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of
Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly.  He charges him thrice the
usual sum; and it's assented to.  Then the Captain knows that Jonah
is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that
paves its rear with gold.  Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse,
prudent suspicions still molest the Captain.  He rings every coin to
find a counterfeit.  Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is
put down for his passage.  'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah
now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.'  'Thou lookest like it,' says
the Captain, 'there's thy room.'  Jonah enters, and would lock the
door, but the lock contains no key.  Hearing him foolishly fumbling
there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something
about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked
within.  All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into
his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on
his forehead.  The air is close, and Jonah gasps.  Then, in that
contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah
feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the
whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.
"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the
wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and
all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity
with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight
itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it
hung.  The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his
tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful
fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.  But that
contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him.  The floor, the
ceiling, and the side, are all awry.  'Oh! so my conscience hangs in
me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of
my soul are all in crookedness!'
"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still
reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of
the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into
him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in
giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed;
and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over
him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the
wound, and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in
his berth, Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning
down to sleep.
"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables;
and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all
careening, glides to sea.  That ship, my friends, was the first of
recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah.  But the sea rebels; he
will not bear the wicked burden.  A dreadful storm comes on, the
ship is like to break.  But now when the boatswain calls all hands to
lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard;
when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank
thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this
raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep.  He sees no black sky
and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or
heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open
mouth is cleaving the seas after him.  Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone
down into the sides of the ship--a berth in the cabin as I have taken
it, and was fast asleep.  But the frightened master comes to him, and
shrieks in his dead ear, 'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!'
Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his
feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon
the sea.  But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow
leaping over the bulwarks.  Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship,
and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the
mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.  And ever, as the
white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the
blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing
high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep.
"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul.  In all his
cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known.  The
sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him,
and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter
to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose
cause this great tempest was upon them.  The lot is Jonah's; that
discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions.
'What is thine occupation?  Whence comest thou?  Thy country?  What
people?  But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah.  The
eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they
not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another
answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is
forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord the God of
Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!'  Fear him, O Jonah?
Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God THEN!  Straightway, he now
goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more
and more appalled, but still are pitiful.  For when Jonah, not yet
supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness
of his deserts,--when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him
and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for HIS sake this
great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek
by other means to save the ship.  But all in vain; the indignant gale
howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the
other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.
"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;
when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea
is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth
water behind.  He goes down in the whirling heart of such a
masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops
seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to
all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison.  Then
Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly.  But observe his
prayer, and learn a weighty lesson.  For sinful as he is, Jonah does
not weep and wail for direct deliverance.  He feels that his dreadful
punishment is just.  He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting
himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will
still look towards His holy temple.  And here, shipmates, is true and
faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for
punishment.  And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is
shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.
Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin
but I do place him before you as a model for repentance.  Sin not;
but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."
While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,
when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.
His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed
the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from
off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all
his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to
them.
There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the
leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with
closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head
lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake
these words:
"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press
upon me.  I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson
that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still
more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.  And now how gladly
would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there
where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads
ME that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a
pilot of the living God.  How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or
speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those
unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at
the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to
escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa.  But God is
everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.  As we have seen, God came
upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of
doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the midst of the
seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down,
and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the watery world
of woe bowled over him.  Yet even then beyond the reach of any
plummet--'out of the belly of hell'--when the whale grounded upon the
ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting
prophet when he cried.  Then God spake unto the fish; and from the
shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up
towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and
earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of
the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears,
like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the
ocean--Jonah did the Almighty's bidding.  And what was that,
shipmates?  To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!  That was
it!
"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
the living God who slights it.  Woe to him whom this world charms
from Gospel duty!  Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters
when God has brewed them into a gale!  Woe to him who seeks to please
rather than to appal!  Woe to him whose good name is more to him than
goodness!  Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour!  Woe
to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!
Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching
to others is himself a castaway!"
He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his
face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out
with a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard
hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of
that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.  Is not the
main-truck higher than the kelson is low?  Delight is to him--a far,
far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud gods and
commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of
this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him.  Delight is to
him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and
destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of
Senators and Judges.  Delight,--top-gallant delight is to him, who
acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a
patriot to heaven.  Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the
billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this
sure Keel of the Ages.  And eternal delight and deliciousness will be
his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath--O
Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I
die.  I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or
mine own.  Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what
is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face
with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had
departed, and he was left alone in the place.
CHAPTER 10
A Bosom Friend.
Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some
time.  He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on
the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face
that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a
jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to
himself in his heathenish way.
But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon,
going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his
lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every
fiftieth page--as I fancied--stopping a moment, looking vacantly
around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of
astonishment.  He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming
to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count
more than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties
being found together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages
was excited.
With much interest I sat watching him.  Savage though he was, and
hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his
countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means
disagreeable.  You cannot hide the soul.  Through all his unearthly
tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and
in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of
a spirit that would dare a thousand devils.  And besides all this,
there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his
uncouthness could not altogether maim.  He looked like a man who had
never cringed and never had had a creditor.  Whether it was, too,
that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and
brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would,
this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was
phrenologically an excellent one.  It may seem ridiculous, but it
reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular
busts of him.  It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope
from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two
long promontories thickly wooded on top.  Queequeg was George
Washington cannibalistically developed.
Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to
be looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my
presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but
appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous
book.  Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the
night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had
found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this
indifference of his very strange.  But savages are strange beings; at
times you do not know exactly how to take them.  At first they are
overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a
Socratic wisdom.  I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at
all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn.  He made
no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the
circle of his acquaintances.  All this struck me as mighty singular;
yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it.
Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of
Cape Horn, that is--which was the only way he could get there--thrown
among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet
Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the
utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to
himself.  Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt
he had never heard there was such a thing as that.  But, perhaps, to
be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living
or so striving.  So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives
himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic
old woman, he must have "broken his digester."
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that
mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it
then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms
gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent,
solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began
to be sensible of strange feelings.  I felt a melting in me.  No more
my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish
world.  This soothing savage had redeemed it.  There he sat, his very
indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized
hypocrisies and bland deceits.  Wild he was; a very sight of sights
to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.
And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were
the very magnets that thus drew me.  I'll try a pagan friend, thought
I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.  I drew
my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my
best to talk with him meanwhile.  At first he little noticed these
advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night's
hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be
bedfellows.  I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased,
perhaps a little complimented.
We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to
him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures
that were in it.  Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we
went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to
be seen in this famous town.  Soon I proposed a social smoke; and,
producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff.  And
then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping
it regularly passing between us.
If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's
breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and
left us cronies.  He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and
unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his
forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that
henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we
were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.
In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed
far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple
savage those old rules would not apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
together.  He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his
enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some
thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of
them towards me, and said it was mine.  I was going to remonstrate;
but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets.  I let
them stay.  He then went about his evening prayers, took out his
idol, and removed the paper fireboard.  By certain signs and
symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well
knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case
he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
Presbyterian Church.  How then could I unite with this wild idolator
in worshipping his piece of wood?  But what is worship? thought I.
Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an
insignificant bit of black wood?  Impossible!  But what is
worship?--to do the will of God--THAT is worship.  And what is the
will of God?--to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man
to do to me--THAT is the will of God.  Now, Queequeg is my fellow
man.  And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me?  Why,
unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship.
Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn
idolator.  So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent
little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before
him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and
went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.
But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for
confidential disclosures between friends.  Man and wife, they say,
there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old
couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning.  Thus,
then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving
pair.
CHAPTER 11
Nightgown.
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free
and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations,
what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we
felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down
the future.
Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position
began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two
noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans.  We
felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of
doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire
in the room.  The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily
warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality
in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.  Nothing
exists in itself.  If you flatter yourself that you are all over
comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to
be comfortable any more.  But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed,
the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled,
why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most
delightfully and unmistakably warm.  For this reason a sleeping
apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the
luxurious discomforts of the rich.  For the height of this sort of
deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and
your snugness and the cold of the outer air.  Then there you lie like
the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all
at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets,
whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way
of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the
snugness of being in bed.  Because no man can ever feel his own
identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were
indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more
congenial to our clayey part.  Upon opening my eyes then, and coming
out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness into the imposed and
coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I
experienced a disagreeable revulsion.  Nor did I at all object to the
hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light,
seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong
desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk.  Be it said, that
though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed
the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when
love once comes to bend them.  For now I liked nothing better than
to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be
full of such serene household joy then.  I no more felt unduly
concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance.  I was only alive
to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a
blanket with a real friend.  With our shaggy jackets drawn about our
shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till
slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated
by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to
far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native
island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and
tell it.  He gladly complied.  Though at the time I but ill
comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when
I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me
to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton
I give.
CHAPTER 12
Biographical.
Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West
and South.  It is not down in any map; true places never are.
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in
a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong
desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or
two.  His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest;
and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of
unconquerable warriors.  There was excellent blood in his
veins--royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal
propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.
A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a
passage to Christian lands.  But the ship, having her full complement
of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's
influence could prevail.  But Queequeg vowed a vow.  Alone in his
canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship
must pass through when she quitted the island.  On one side was a
coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove
thickets that grew out into the water.  Hiding his canoe, still
afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in
the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like
a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his
foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing
himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and
swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a
cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and
Queequeg budged not.  Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his
wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and
told him he might make himself at home.  But this fine young
savage--this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin.
They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him.  But
like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities,
Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily
gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen.  For at
bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a profound desire to learn
among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still
happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they
were.  But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that
even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more
so, than all his father's heathens.  Arrived at last in old Sag
Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to
Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also,
poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.  Thought he, it's a wicked world
in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these
Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish.
Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.
By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and
having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and
gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts.  He answered
no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather
Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled
throne of thirty pagan Kings before him.  But by and by, he said, he
would return,--as soon as he felt himself baptized again.  For the
nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in
all four oceans.  They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed
iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
movements.  He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation.
Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed
him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most
promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from.  He at
once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same
vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with
me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly
dip into the Potluck of both worlds.  To all this I joyously
assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was
an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great
usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries
of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant
seamen.
His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg
embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the
light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very
soon were sleeping.
CHAPTER 13
Wheelbarrow.
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a
barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using,
however, my comrade's money.  The grinning landlord, as well as the
boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had
sprung up between me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock
and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me
concerning the very person whom I now companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own
poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went
down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at
the wharf.  As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg
so much--for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
streets,--but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms.  But
we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and
Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon
barbs.  I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him
ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find their own
harpoons.  To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I
hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own
harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal
combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales.  In short,
like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows
armed with their own scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish
them--even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his
own harpoon.
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story
about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen.  It was in Sag Harbor.
The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry
his heavy chest to his boarding house.  Not to seem ignorant about
the thing--though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise
way in which to manage the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it;
lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the
wharf.  "Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than
that, one would think.  Didn't the people laugh?"
Upon this, he told me another story.  The people of his island of
Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant
water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a
punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament
on the braided mat where the feast is held.  Now a certain grand
merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all
accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea
captain--this commander was invited to the wedding feast of
Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten.  Well;
when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo
cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of
honour, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the
High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father.  Grace being
said,--for those people have their grace as well as we--though
Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to
our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance
upwards to the great Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say, being said,
the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the
island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers
into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates.  Seeing himself
placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking
himself--being Captain of a ship--as having plain precedence over a
mere island King, especially in the King's own house--the Captain
coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;--taking it I
suppose for a huge finger-glass.  "Now," said Queequeg, "what you
tink now?--Didn't our people laugh?"
At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the
schooner.  Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river.  On one
side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered
trees all glittering in the clear, cold air.  Huge hills and
mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by
side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at
last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with
blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening
that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long
voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a
third, and so on, for ever and for aye.  Such is the endlessness,
yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the
little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his
snortings.  How I snuffed that Tartar air!--how I spurned that
turnpike earth!--that common highway all over dented with the marks
of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity
of the sea which will permit no records.
At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed
teeth.  On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to
the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan.
Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a
wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land
tornadoes.  So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the
plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering
glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that
two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man
were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.  But there
were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense
greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure.
Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his
back.  I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come.  Dropping his
harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost
miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the
air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow
landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his
back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a
puff.
"Capting!  Capting! yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;
"Capting, Capting, here's the devil."
"Hallo, YOU sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking
up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that?  Don't you know
you might have killed that chap?"
"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there,"
pointing to the still shivering greenhorn.
"Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an
unearthly expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e;
Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"
"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if
you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."
But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain
to mind his own eye.  The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had
parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from
side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck.
The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept
overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the
boom to stay it, seemed madness.  It flew from right to left, and
back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant
seemed on the point of snapping into splinters.  Nothing was done,
and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on deck rushed
towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the lower
jaw of an exasperated whale.  In the midst of this consternation,
Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the path of
the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks,
and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as
it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way
trapped, and all was safe.  The schooner was run into the wind, and
while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped
to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap.
For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing
his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his
brawny shoulders through the freezing foam.  I looked at the grand
and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved.  The greenhorn had
gone down.  Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water,
Queequeg, now took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see
just how matters were, dived down and disappeared.  A few minutes
more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the
other dragging a lifeless form.  The boat soon picked them up.  The
poor bumpkin was restored.  All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump;
the captain begged his pardon.  From that hour I clove to Queequeg
like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
Was there ever such unconsciousness?  He did not seem to think that
he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies.
He only asked for water--fresh water--something to wipe the brine
off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning
against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to
be saying to himself--"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all
meridians.  We cannibals must help these Christians."
CHAPTER 14
Nantucket.
Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after
a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket!  Take out your map and look at it.  See what a real corner
of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more
lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse.  Look at it--a mere hillock,
and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.  There is more
sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for
blotting paper.  Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to
plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada
thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a
leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried
about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant
toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer
time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's
walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like
Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every
way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean,
that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be
found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles.  But these
extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was
settled by the red-men.  Thus goes the legend.  In olden times an
eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an
infant Indian in his talons.  With loud lament the parents saw their
child borne out of sight over the wide waters.  They resolved to
follow in the same direction.  Setting out in their canoes, after a
perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an
empty ivory casket,--the poor little Indian's skeleton.
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should
take to the sea for a livelihood!  They first caught crabs and
quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for
mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured
cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea,
explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of
circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in
all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the
mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous
and most mountainous!  That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed
with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics
are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing
from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery
world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the
Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did
Poland.  Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada;
let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing
banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the
Nantucketer's.  For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own
empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it.  Merchant
ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even
pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the
road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like
themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless
deep itself.  The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea;
he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro
ploughing it as his own special plantation.  THERE is his home; THERE
lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though
it overwhelmed all the millions in China.  He lives on the sea, as
prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs
them as chamois hunters climb the Alps.  For years he knows not the
land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another
world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.  With the
landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep
between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of
land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very
pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
CHAPTER 15
Chowder.
It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to
anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no
business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed.  The
landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea
Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one
of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured
us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders.
In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than
try pot-luck at the Try Pots.  But the directions he had given us
about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened
a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard
hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that
done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these
crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially
as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse--our
first point of departure--must be left on the larboard hand, whereas
I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard.
However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and
then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at
last came to something which there was no mistaking.
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears,
swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an
old doorway.  The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the
other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a
gallows.  Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the
time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague
misgiving.  A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two
remaining horns; yes, TWO of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me.
It's ominous, thinks I.  A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my
first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's
chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too!
Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?
I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman
with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,
under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an
injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple
woollen shirt.
"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"
"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right.  There's Mrs. Hussey."
And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving
Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs.  Upon
making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey,
postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little
room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently
concluded repast, turned round to us and said--"Clam or Cod?"
"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.
"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.
"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?"
says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter
time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"
But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple
Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear
nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door
leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.
"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for
us both on one clam?"
However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
apparently cheerless prospect before us.  But when that smoking
chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained.  Oh, sweet
friends! hearken to me.  It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely
bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted
pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and
plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.  Our appetites being
sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing
his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being
surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when
leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod
announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment.  Stepping to
the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis, and
resumed my seat.  In a few moments the savoury steam came forth
again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine
cod-chowder was placed before us.
We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks
I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head?
What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people?  "But
look, Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl?  Where's your
harpoon?"
Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved
its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders.  Chowder
for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till
you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes.  The
area before the house was paved with clam-shells.  Mrs. Hussey wore a
polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his
account books bound in superior old shark-skin.  There was a fishy
flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till
one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some
fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish
remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's
decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.
Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to
precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and
demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers.  "Why
not? said I; "every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon--but why
not?"  "Because it's dangerous," says she.  "Ever since young Stiggs
coming from that unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years
and a half, with only three barrels of ILE, was found dead in my
first floor back, with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I
allow no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at
night.  So, Mr. Queequeg" (for she had learned his name), "I will
just take this here iron, and keep it for you till morning.  But the
chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?"
"Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of
variety."
CHAPTER 16
The Ship.
In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow.  But to my surprise and
no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had
been diligently consulting Yojo--the name of his black little
god--and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly
insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our going together among
the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting our craft;
instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of
the ship should rest wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed
befriending us; and, in order to do so, had already pitched upon a
vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should infallibly light
upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by chance; and in
that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the present
irrespective of Queequeg.
I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed
great confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising
forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a
rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the
whole, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the
selection of our craft; I did not like that plan at all.  I had not a
little relied upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler best
fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely.  But as all my
remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to
acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a
determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly
settle that trifling little affair.  Next morning early, leaving
Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little bedroom--for it seemed that
it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation,
and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that day; HOW it was I never could
find out, for, though I applied myself to it several times, I never
could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles--leaving Queequeg,
then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his
sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping.
After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt
that there were three ships up for three-years' voyages--The
Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod.  DEVIL-DAM, I do not know
the origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no doubt
remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts
Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes.  I peered and pryed about
the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally,
going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then
decided that this was the very ship for us.
You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod.  She was a ship of the
old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned
claw-footed look about her.  Long seasoned and weather-stained in the
typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was
darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and
Siberia.  Her venerable bows looked bearded.  Her masts--cut
somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost
overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of
the three old kings of Cologne.  Her ancient decks were worn and
wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury
Cathedral where Becket bled.  But to all these her old antiquities,
were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild
business that for more than half a century she had followed.  Old
Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another
vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal
owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his
chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid
it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device,
unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or
bedstead.  She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor,
his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory.  She was a thing of
trophies.  A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the
chased bones of her enemies.  All round, her unpanelled, open
bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp
teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old
hempen thews and tendons to.  Those thews ran not through base blocks
of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory.
Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a
tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the
long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.  The helmsman who
steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he
holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw.  A noble craft, but
somehow a most melancholy!  All noble things are touched with that.
Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having
authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage,
at first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort
of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast.  It
seemed only a temporary erection used in port.  It was of a conical
shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of
limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws
of the right-whale.  Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a
circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each
other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose
hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old
Pottowottamie Sachem's head.  A triangular opening faced towards the
bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view
forward.
And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who
by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and
the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden
of command.  He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling
all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of
a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
constructed.
There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance
of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old
seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker
style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the
minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen
from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become
pursed together.  Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of
the tent.
"Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of
him?" he demanded.
"I was thinking of shipping."
"Thou wast, wast thou?  I see thou art no Nantucketer--ever been in
a stove boat?"
"No, Sir, I never have."
"Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?
"Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn.  I've been
several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that--"
"Merchant service be damned.  Talk not that lingo to me.  Dost see
that leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou
talkest of the marchant service to me again.  Marchant service
indeed!  I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in
those marchant ships.  But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a
whaling, eh?--it looks a little suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast not
been a pirate, hast thou?--Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst
thou?--Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to
sea?"
I protested my innocence of these things.  I saw that under the mask
of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
Vineyard.
"But what takes thee a-whaling?  I want to know that before I think
of shipping ye."
"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is.  I want to see the world."
"Want to see what whaling is, eh?  Have ye clapped eye on Captain
Ahab?"
"Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"
"Aye, aye, I thought so.  Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."
"I am mistaken then.  I thought I was speaking to the Captain
himself."
"Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,
young man.  It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod
fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including
crew.  We are part owners and agents.  But as I was going to say, if
thou wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can
put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past
backing out.  Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find
that he has only one leg."
"What do you mean, sir?  Was the other one lost by a whale?"
"Lost by a whale!  Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured,
chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped
a boat!--ah, ah!"
I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched
at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly
as I could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could
I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale,
though indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of
the accident."
"Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou
dost not talk shark a bit.  SURE, ye've been to sea before now; sure
of that?"
"Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in
the merchant--"
"Hard down out of that!  Mind what I said about the marchant
service--don't aggravate me--I won't have it.  But let us understand
each other.  I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye
yet feel inclined for it?"
"I do, sir."
"Very good.  Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live
whale's throat, and then jump after it?  Answer, quick!"
"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to
be got rid of, that is; which I don't take to be the fact."
"Good again.  Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to
find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in
order to see the world?  Was not that what ye said?  I thought so.
Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the
weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there."
For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not
knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest.
But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg
started me on the errand.
Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the
ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
pointing towards the open ocean.  The prospect was unlimited, but
exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that
I could see.
"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye
see?"
"Not much," I replied--"nothing but water; considerable horizon
though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."
"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world?  Do ye wish to
go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh?  Can't ye see the world
where you stand?"
I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and
the Pequod was as good a ship as any--I thought the best--and all
this I now repeated to Peleg.  Seeing me so determined, he expressed
his willingness to ship me.
"And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off," he added--"come
along with ye."  And so saying, he led the way below deck into the
cabin.
Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
surprising figure.  It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along
with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the
other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by
a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery
wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of
plank, or a nail or two in the ship.  People in Nantucket invest
their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in
approved state stocks bringing in good interest.
Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a
Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and
to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure
the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously
modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous.  For some of
these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and
whale-hunters.  They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a
vengeance.
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with
Scripture names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in
childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of
the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.  And
when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force,
with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the
stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest
waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been
led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all
nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin
voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some
help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty
language--that man makes one in a whole nation's census--a mighty
pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.  Nor will it at all
detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other
circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness
at the bottom of his nature.  For all men tragically great are made
so through a certain morbidness.  Be sure of this, O young ambition,
all mortal greatness is but disease.  But, as yet we have not to do
with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if
indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the
Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired
whaleman.  But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what
are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious
things the veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been
originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket
Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many
unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn--all that had not
moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as
altered one angle of his vest.  Still, for all this immutableness,
was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain
Peleg.  Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms
against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the
Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet
had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of
leviathan gore.  How now in the contemplative evening of his days,
the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do
not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably
he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a
man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.
This world pays dividends.  Rising from a little cabin-boy in short
clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied
waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain,
and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded
his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the
goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet
receiving of his well-earned income.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
task-master.  They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his
crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the
hospital, sore exhausted and worn out.  For a pious man, especially
for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the
least.  He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but
somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work
out of them.  When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured
eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till
you could clutch something--a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to
work like mad, at something or other, never mind what.  Indolence and
idleness perished before him.  His own person was the exact
embodiment of his utilitarian character.  On his long, gaunt body, he
carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft,
economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin.  The space between the
decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always
sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails.  His
broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his
drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he
seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.
"Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh?  Ye have
been studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my
certain knowledge.  How far ye got, Bildad?"
As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,
Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up,
and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
"He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship."
"Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
"I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
"What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg.
"He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at
his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.
I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as
Peleg, his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer.  But I
said nothing, only looking round me sharply.  Peleg now threw open a
chest, and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink
before him, and seated himself at a little table.  I began to think
it was high time to settle with myself at what terms I would be
willing to engage for the voyage.  I was already aware that in the
whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the
captain, received certain shares of the profits called lays, and that
these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining
to the respective duties of the ship's company.  I was also aware
that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very
large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a
ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I
had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay--that is, the
275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that
might eventually amount to.  And though the 275th lay was what they
call a rather LONG LAY, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had
a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear
out on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which
I would not have to pay one stiver.
It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
fortune--and so it was, a very poor way indeed.  But I am one of
those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite
content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am
putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud.  Upon the whole, I
thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not
have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was
of a broad-shouldered make.
But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had
heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony
Bildad; how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod,
therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners,
left nearly the whole management of the ship's affairs to these two.
And I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty
deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on
board the Pequod, quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his
Bible as if at his own fireside.  Now while Peleg was vainly trying
to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small
surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these
proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself
out of his book, "LAY not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,
where moth--"
"Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay
shall we give this young man?"
"Thou knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust
do corrupt, but LAY--'"
LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh!  Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for
one, shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do
corrupt.  It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though
from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a
landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven
hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you
come to make a TEENTH of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven
hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less
than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought
at the time.
"Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to
swindle this young man! he must have more than that."
"Seven hundred and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without
lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling--"for where your treasure
is, there will your heart be also."
"I am going to put him down for the three hundredth," said Peleg, "do
ye hear that, Bildad!  The three hundredth lay, I say."
Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,
"Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider
the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship--widows and
orphans, many of them--and that if we too abundantly reward the
labors of this young man, we may be taking the bread from those
widows and those orphans.  The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay,
Captain Peleg."
"Thou Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the
cabin.  "Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in
these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that
would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed
round Cape Horn."
"Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing
ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art
still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy
conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee
foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg."
"Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing,
ye insult me.  It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature
that he's bound to hell.  Flukes and flames!  Bildad, say that again
to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll swallow a
live goat with all his hair and horns on.  Out of the cabin, ye
canting, drab-coloured son of a wooden gun--a straight wake with ye!"
As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a
marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded
him.
Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and
responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up
all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad,
who, I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the
awakened wrath of Peleg.  But to my astonishment, he sat down again
on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest
intention of withdrawing.  He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg
and his ways.  As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had,
there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb,
though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated.  "Whew!"
he whistled at last--"the squall's gone off to leeward, I think.
Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen,
will ye.  My jack-knife here needs the grindstone.  That's he; thank
ye, Bildad.  Now then, my young man, Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye
say?  Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth
lay."
"Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to ship
too--shall I bring him down to-morrow?"
"To be sure," said Peleg.  "Fetch him along, and we'll look at him."
"What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book
in which he had again been burying himself.
"Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg.  "Has he ever
whaled it any?" turning to me.
"Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."
"Well, bring him along then."
And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that
I had done a good morning's work, and that the Pequod was the
identical ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round
the Cape.
But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the
Captain with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though,
indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out,
and receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself
visible by arriving to take command; for sometimes these voyages are
so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief,
that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of
that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port,
but leaves her to the owners till all is ready for sea.  However, it
is always as well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing
yourself into his hands.  Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg,
inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
"And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab?  It's all right enough;
thou art shipped."
"Yes, but I should like to see him."
"But I don't think thou wilt be able to at present.  I don't know
exactly what's the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the
house; a sort of sick, and yet he don't look so.  In fact, he ain't
sick; but no, he isn't well either.  Any how, young man, he won't
always see me, so I don't suppose he will thee.  He's a queer man,
Captain Ahab--so some think--but a good one.  Oh, thou'lt like him
well enough; no fear, no fear.  He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man,
Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you
may well listen.  Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common;
Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to
deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier,
stranger foes than whales.  His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest
that out of all our isle!  Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he
ain't Captain Peleg; HE'S AHAB, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest,
was a crowned king!"
"And a very vile one.  When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did
they not lick his blood?"
"Come hither to me--hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance
in his eye that almost startled me.  "Look ye, lad; never say that on
board the Pequod.  Never say it anywhere.  Captain Ahab did not name
himself.  'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed
mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old.  And yet the old
squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove
prophetic.  And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the
same.  I wish to warn thee.  It's a lie.  I know Captain Ahab well;
I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is--a good
man--not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good
man--something like me--only there's a good deal more of him.  Aye,
aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the
passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was
the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that
about, as any one might see.  I know, too, that ever since he lost
his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of
moody--desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass
off.  And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man,
it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad
one.  So good-bye to thee--and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he
happens to have a wicked name.  Besides, my boy, he has a wife--not
three voyages wedded--a sweet, resigned girl.  Think of that; by that
sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any
utter, hopeless harm in Ahab?  No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if
he be, Ahab has his humanities!"
As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been
incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain
wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him.  And somehow, at the
time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know
what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg.  And yet I also felt a
strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all
describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was.  But I felt
it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt
impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he
was known to me then.  However, my thoughts were at length carried in
other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.