
     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 down-town 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 glasses!
of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a
still better seaward peep.  But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up
in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.
How then is this?  Are the green fields gone?  What do they here?  But look!
here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for
a dive.  Strange!  Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the
land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice.
No.  They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling
in.  And there they stand--miles of them--leagues.  Inlanders all, they come
from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, --north, east, south, and west.
Yet here they all unite.  Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of
the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?  Once more.  Say, you
are in the country; in some high land of lakes.  Take almost any path you
please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there
by a pool in the stream.  There is magic in it.  Let the most absent-minded
of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his
feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in
all that region.  Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert,
try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor.  Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

     But here is an artist.  He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the
Saco.  What is the chief element he employs?  There stand his trees, each with
a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps
his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a
sleepy smoke.  Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to
overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.  But though
the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs
like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.  Go visit the
Prairies in June,
when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what
is the one charm wanting? --Water --there is not a drop of water there!  Were
Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see
it?  Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls
of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or
invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach?  Why is almost every
robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other
crazy to go to sea?  Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you
yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your
ship were now out of sight of land?  Why did the old Persians hold the sea
holy?  Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?
Surely all this is not without meaning.  And still deeper the meaning of that
story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image
he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.  But that same
image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.  It is the image of the
ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.  Now, when I say
that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the
eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it
inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger.  For to go as a passenger you
must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something
in it.  Besides, passengers get sea-sick --grow quarrelsome --don't sleep of
nights --do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing; --no, I never go as a
passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.  I abandon the glory and distinction of
such offices to those who like them.  For my part, I abominate all honorable
respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.  It is
quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of
ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.  And as for going as cook, --
though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of
officer on ship-board --yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls; --though
once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered,
there is no one who will
speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I
will.  It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled
ibis 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 honor,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van
Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.  And more than all, if just
previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a
country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you.  The
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the 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 aint 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 forecastle
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.

     I stuffed a shirt or two into my old
carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the
Pacific.  Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New
Bedford.  It was on a Saturday night in December.  Much was I disappointed
upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and
that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.  As
most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling
stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as
well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing.  For my mind was
made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine,
boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island,
which amazingly pleased me.  Besides though New Bedford has of late been
gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor
old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original
--the Tyre of this Carthage; --the place where the first dead American whale
was stranded.  Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen,
the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan?  And
where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put
forth, partly laden with imported cobble-stones --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.

     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 oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way
defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights 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 ice-bound 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 afterward 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 fire-places 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 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 Alleganian 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 favorite with them, they raised a cry of
Bulkington!  Bulkington!  where's Bulkington?  and darted out of the house in
pursuit of him.  It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost
supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon
a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the
seamen.  No man prefers to sleep two in a bed.  In fact, you would a good deal
rather not sleep with your own brother.  I don't know how it is, but people
like to be private when they are sleeping.  And when it comes to sleeping with
an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger
a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply.  Nor was there any
earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody
else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do
ashore.  To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have
your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your
own skin.  The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated
the thought of sleeping with him.  It was fair to presume that being a
harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the
tidiest, certainly none of the finest.  I began to twitch all over.  Besides,
it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going
bedwards.  Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight --how could I
tell from what vile hole he had been coming?  Landlord!  I've changed my mind
about that harpooneer. -- I shan't sleep with him.  I'll try the bench here.
just as you please; i'm sorry i cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress,
and it's a plaguy rough board here --feeling of the knots and notches.  But
wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've
got a carpenter's plane there in the bar --wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug
enough.  So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief
first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while
grinning like an ape.  The shavings flew right and left; till at last the
plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot.  The landlord was near
spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's sake to quit -- the bed was
soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world
could make eider down of a pine plank.  So gathering up the shavings with
another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the
room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown study.  I now took
the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but that
could be mended with a chair.  But it was a foot too narrow, and the other
bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one --so there
was no yoking them.  I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only
clear space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back
to settle down in.  But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold
air over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do
at all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from
the window, and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the
immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.  The
devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I steal a march on
him --bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the
most violent knockings?  it seemed no bad idea; but upon second thoughts I
dismissed it.  For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I
popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all
ready to knock me down!  Still, looking around me again, and seeing no possible
chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I
began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices
against this unknown harpooneer.  Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be
dropping in before long.  I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we
may become jolly good bedfellows after all --there's no telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and
going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.  Landlord!  said I, what sort of
a chap is he --does he always keep such late hours?  It was now hard upon
twelve o'clock.  The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and
seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension.  No, he
answered, generally he's an early bird -- airley to bed and airley to rise
--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 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 room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty big
bed that.  Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little
Johnny in the foot of it.  But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night,
and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm.
After
that, Sal said it wouldn't do.  Come along here, I'll give ye a glim in a
jiffy; and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to
lead the way.  But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner,
he exclaimed I vum it's Sunday --you won't see that harpooneer to-night; he's
come to anchor somewhere --come along then; do come; won't ye come?  I
considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was
ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a
prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep
abreast.  There, said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea
chest that did 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 color, here and there stuck over with large,
blackish looking squares.  Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible
bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just
from the surgeon.  But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards
the light, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all,
those black squares on his cheeks.  they were stains of some sort or other.  At
first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth
occurred to me.  I remembered a story of a white man --a whaleman too--who,
falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them.  I concluded that this
harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a
similar adventure.  And what is it, thought I, after all!  It's only his
outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.  But then, what to make of
his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and
completely independent of the squares of tattooing.  To be sure, it might be
nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun's
tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one.  However, I had never been
in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary
effects upon the skin.  Now, while all these ideas were passing through me
like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all.  But, after some
difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently
pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on.
Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the
New Zealand head --a ghastly thing enough --and crammed it down into the bag.
He now took off his hat --a new beaver hat --when I came nigh singing out with
fresh surprise.  There was no hair on his head --none to speak of at least --
nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead.  His bald purplish
head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.  Had not the stranger
stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever
I bolted a dinner.  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 color of a three days' old Congo baby.
Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black
manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner.  But seeing that it
was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony,
I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it
proved to be.  For now the savage goes up to the empty fireplace, and removing
the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunchbacked 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 into 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 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 aint 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 wont touch a
leg of ye.  Good night, landlord, said I, you may go.  I turned in, and
never slept better in my life.

     Upon waking next morning about daylight,
I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate
manner.  You had almost thought I had been his wife.  The counterpane was of
patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this
arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a
figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade --owing I suppose to
his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt
sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times --this same arm of his, I say,
looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.  Indeed,
partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it
from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the
sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
My sensations were strange.  Let me try to explain them.  When I was a child,
I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it
was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.  The circumstance was
this.  I had been cutting up some caper or other --I think it was trying to
crawl up the chimney, as i had seen a little sweep do a few days previous;
and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or
sending me to bed supperless, --my mother dragged me by the legs out of the
chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the
afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere.  I
felt dreadfully.  But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my
little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as
to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.  I lay there
dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope
for a resurrection.  Sixteen hours in
bed!  the small of my back ached to think of it.  And it was so light too;
the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the
streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house.  I felt worse and
worse --at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged
feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet,
beseeching her as a particular favor to give me a good slippering for my
misbehavior; 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 bedside.  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 state -- neither caterpillar nor butterfly.  He was just
enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible
manner.  his education was not yet completed.  He was an undergraduate.  If he
had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have
troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a
savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on.
At last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his
eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much
accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones -- probably not
made to order either --rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of
a bitter cold morning.  Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window,
and that the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain
view into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that
Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I
begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and
particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible.  He complied,
and then proceeded to wash himself.  At that time in the morning any
Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement,
contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and
hands.  He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on
the wash-stand centre-table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his
face.  I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he
takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock,
unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the
bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather
harpooning of his cheeks.  Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best
cutlery with a vengeance.  Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation
when I came to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how
exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept.
the rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the
room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon
like a marshal's baton.

     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.

     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, Tongatabooarrs, 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.

     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,
.  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,
.  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,
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.

     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 favorite.  He had been a sailor and a
harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the
ministry.  At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter
of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second
flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone
certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom --the spring verdure peeping
forth even beneath February's snow.  No one having previously heard his
history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost
interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about
him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led.  When he entered
I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his
carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great
pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of
the water it had absorbed.  However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by
one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when,
arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.  Like most old
fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to
such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the
already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the
hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting
a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting
a ship from a boat at sea.  The wife of a whaling captain had provided the
chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which,
being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany color, the whole
contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in
bad taste.  Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both
hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a
look upwards, and then with a truly sailorlike 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 the projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's
fiddle-headed beak.  What could be more full of meaning? --for the pulpit is
ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit
leads the world.  From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first
descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt.  From thence it is the
God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds.  Yes, the
world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit
is its prow.

     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 look'st like it," says
the Captain, "there's thy room."  Jonah enters, and would lock the door,
but the lock contains no key.  Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the
Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of
convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within.  All dressed and
dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little
state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead.  The air is close, and
jonah gasps.  then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's
water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when

     the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowel's wards.  Screwed at
its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's
room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the
last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still
maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth,

     infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels
among which it hung.  The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his
berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful
fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.  But that contradiction in
the lamp more and
more appals him.  The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.  "Oh!  so
my conscience hangs in me!" he groans, "straight upward, so it burns; but the
chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!"  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 the Lord out
of the fish's belly.  But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon
his prison.  Then Jonah prayed unto learn a weighty lesson.  For sinful as he
is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance.  He feels that his
dreadful punishment is just.  He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting

     himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still
look towards His holy temple.  And here, shipmates, is true and faithful
repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.  And how
pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual
deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.  Shipmates, I do not place
Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a
model for repentance.  Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like
Jonah.  While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when
describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.  His deep
chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring
elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy
brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look
on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.  There now came a lull in
his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more; and,
at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed
communing with God and himself.  But again he leaned over towards the people,
and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest
humility, he spake these words: Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon
you; both his hands press upon me.  I have read ye by what murky light may
be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye,
and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.  And now how gladly
would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you
sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other
and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me as a pilot of
the living God.  How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true
things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of
a wicked nineveh, jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from
his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at
Joppa.  But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.  As we have seen,
God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of
doom, and with swift slantings tore him along"into the midst of the seas,"
where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and"the weeds
were wrapped about his head," and all the watery world of woe bowled over
him.  Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet --"out of the belly of
hell" --when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God
heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.  Then God spake unto the
fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came
breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air
and earth; and"vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;" when the word of the
Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten --his ears, like two
sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean --Jonah did the
Almighty's bidding.  And what was that, shipmates?  To preach the Truth to the
face of Falsehood!  That was it!  This, shipmates, this is that other lesson;
and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it.  Woe to him whom this
world charms from Gospel duty!  Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the
waters when God has brewed them into a gale!  Woe to him who seeks to please
rather than to appal!  Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!

     Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!  Woe to him who would not
be true, even though to be false were salvation!  Yea, woe to him who, as the
great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to
them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly
enthusiasm, -- but oh!  shipmates!  on the starboard hand of every woe, there is
a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the
woe is
deep.  Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?  Delight is to
him --a far, far upward, and inward delight --who against the proud gods and
commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.  Delight
is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base
treacherous world has gone down beneath him.  Delight is to him, who gives
no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he
pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.  Delight,
--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the
Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.  Delight is to him, whom all
the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake
from this sure Keel of the Ages.  And eternal delight and deliciousness will
be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath --O Father!
--chiefly known to me by Thy rod --mortal or immortal, here I die.  I have
striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own.  Yet this is
nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out
the lifetime of his God?  He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction,
covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the
people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.

     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.

     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 knee-pans were warming-pans.  We felt very nice
and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of
bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room.  The more so, I
say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be
cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by
contrast.  Nothing exists in itself.  If you flatter yourself that you are all
over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to
be comfortable any more.  But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip
of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed,
in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm.

     For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire,
which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.  For the height of
this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the 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.

     Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, 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 ringbolt 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.

     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 furnished 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 honor,
placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and
his majesty the King, Queequeg's father.  Grace being said, -- for those people
have their grace as well as we --though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who
at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying
the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts --Grace, I say,
being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of
the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into
the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates.  Seeing himself placed next
the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself --being Captain of
a ship --as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the
King's own house --the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch
bowl; --taking it i suppose for a huge finger-glass.  now, said Queequeg,

     what you tink now, --Didn't our people laugh?  At last, passage paid, and
luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.  Hoisting sail, it glided down
the Acushnet river.  On
one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees
all glittering in the clear, cold air.  Huge hills and mountains of casks on
casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale
ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of
carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the
pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most
perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended,
only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye.  Such is the
endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.  Gaining the
more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the
quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings.  How I snuffed that
Tartar air! --how I spurned that turnpike earth! --that common highway all over
dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the
magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.  At the same
foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.  His dusky nostrils
swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth.  On, on we flew, and
our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her
brows 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.

     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 snowshoes;

     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.

     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 favorite 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 savory 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.

     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 on Queequeg's sagacity to
point out the whaler best fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely.  But
as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to
acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a
determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that
trifling little affair.  Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with
Yojo in our little bedroom --for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or
Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo
that
day; how it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it
several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles --leaving
Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at
his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping.  After
much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there
were three ships up for three-years' voyages --The Devil-Dam the Tit-bit,
and the pequod.  devil- dam, i do not know the origin of; tit-bit is
obvious; Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated
tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes.  I peered
and pryed about the Devil-Dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and,
finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then
decided that this was the very ship for us.  You may have seen many a quaint
craft in your day, for aught I know; --squared-toed luggers; mountainous
Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it,

     you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod.  She was a
ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned
claw-footed look about her.  Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons
and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a
French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.  Her
venerable bows looked bearded.  Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan,
where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale --her masts stood
stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne.  Her ancient
decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in
Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled.  But to all these her old
antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild
business that for more than half a century she had followed.  Old Captain
Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his
own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the
Pequod, --this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon

     her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both
of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's
carved buckler or bedstead.  She was
apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants
of polished ivory.  She was a thing of trophies.  A cannibal of a craft,
tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.  All round, her
unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the
long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her
old hempen thews and tendons to.  Those thews ran not through base blocks of
land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory.  Scorning a
turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that
tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her
hereditary foe.  The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt
like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw.  A
noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!  All noble things are touched
with that.  Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having
authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at
first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or
rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast.  It seemed only a
temporary erection used in port.  It was of a conical shape, some ten feet
high;  consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from
the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.  Planted with their
broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually
sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where
the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like a top-knot on some old
Pottowotamie Sachem's head.  A triangular opening faced towards the bows of
the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view forward.  And half
concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect
seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship's work
suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command.  He was seated
on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving; and
the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic
stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.  There was nothing so very
particular, perhaps, about the
appearance of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old
seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;
only there was a fine and 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 are 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 inuendoes, 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 dost thou think then of seeing the world?  Do ye wish to
go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh?  Can't ye see the world where
you stand?  I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would;
and the Pequod was as good a ship as any --I thought the best -- and all this I
now repeated to Peleg.  Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness
to ship me.  And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off, he added
-- come along with ye.  And so saying, he led the way below deck into the
cabin.  seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
surprising figure.  It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with
Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares,
as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old
annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning
about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the
ship.  People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same
way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.
Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers,
was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to
this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the
peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by
things altogether alien and heterogeneous.  For some of these same Quakers are
the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters.  They are fighting
Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.  So that there are instances among
them of men, who, named with Scripture names --a singularly common fashion on
the island --and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and
thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.  And when these things unite
in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a
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 selfsame serious things
the veriest of all trifles --Captain Bildad
had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of
Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many
unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn --all that had not moved this
native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of
his vest.  Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common
consistency about worthy Captain Bildad.  Though refusing, from conscientious
scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably
invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed,
yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan
gore.  How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad
reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not
seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the
sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this
practical world quite another.  This world pays dividends.  Rising from a
little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a
broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and
captain, and finally a ship-owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded
his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age
of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his
well-earned income.  Now Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of
being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
task-master.  They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious
story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving
home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn
out.  For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather
hard-hearted to say the least.  He never used to swear, though, at his men,
they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated
hard work out of them.  When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his
drab-colored eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous,
till you could clutch something --a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work
like mad, at something or other, never mind what.  Indolence and
idleness perished from before him.  His own person was the exact embodiment of
his utilitarian character.  On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare
flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it,
like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.  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
nett 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-colored son of a wooden
gun --a straight wake with ye!  As he thundered out this he made a rush at
Bildad, but with a marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that
time eluded him.  Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal
and responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all
idea of sailing in a vessel so 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.

     As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and
Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till
towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's
religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my
heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or
those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of
footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso
of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate
possessions yet owned and rented in his name.  I say, we good Presbyterian
christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so
vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their
half-crazy conceits on these subjects.  There was Queequeg, now, certainly
entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan; --but what of
that?  Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be
content; and there let him rest.  All our arguing with him would not avail;
let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all --Presbyterians and Pagans
alike --for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly
need mending.  Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances
and rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but
no answer.  I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside.  Queequeg, said
I softly through the key-hole: --all silent.  I say, Queequeg!  why don't you
speak?  It's I--Ishmael.  But all remained still as before.  I began to grow
alarmed.  I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had
an apoplectic fit.  I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into
an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and
sinister one.  I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of

the wall, but nothing more.  I was surprised to behold resting against the
wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening
previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber.  That's
strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he
seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here,
and no possible mistake.  Queequeg! --Queequeg! --all still.  Something must
have happened.  Apoplexy!  I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly

     resisted.  Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first
person i met --the chambermaid.  la!  la!  she cried, i thought something
must be the matter.  I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door
was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it's been just so silent ever
since.  But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage
in for safe keeping.  La!  La, ma'am! --Mistress!  murder!  Mrs. Hussey!
apoplexy! --and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following.
Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet
in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the
castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.  Wood-house!  cried I,

     which way to it?  Run for God's sake, and fetch something to pry open the
door --the axe! --the axe!  he's had a stroke; depend upon it! --and so saying I
was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey
interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her
countenance.  What's the matter with you, young man?  Get the axe!  For
God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open!  Look here,
said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one
hand free; look here; are you talking about prying open any of my doors?
--and with that she seized my arm.  What's the matter with you?  What's the
matter with you, shipmate?  In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I
gave her to understand the whole case.  Unconsciously clapping the
vinegar-cruet
to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed -- No!  I
haven't seen it since I put it there.  Running to a little closet under the
landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's
harpoon was missing.  He's killed himself, she cried.  It's unfort'nate
stiggs done over again --there goes another counterpane --god pity his poor
mother! --it will be the ruin of my house.  Has the poor lad a sister?  Where's
that girl? --there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint
me a sign, with --"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;"
--might as well kill both birds at once.  Kill?  The Lord be merciful to his
ghost!  What's that noise there?  You, young man, avast there!  And running
up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the door.  I
won't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled.  Go for the locksmith,
there's one about a mile from here.  But avast!  putting her hand in her
side-pocket, here's a key that'll fit, I guess; let's see.  And with that,
she turned it in the lock; but, alas!  Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained
unwithdrawn within.  Have to burst it open, said I, and was running down
the entry a little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again
vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a
sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.  With a prodigious
noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the wall, sent the
plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens!  there sat Queequeg,
altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of the room;
squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head.  He looked neither

     one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of
active life.  Queequeg, said I, going up to him, Queequeg, what's the
matter with you?  He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?  said the
landlady.  But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost
felt like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally
constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for
upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.  Mrs.
Hussey, said I, he's alive at all events; so leave us, if you please, and
I will see to this strange affair myself.  Closing the door upon the landlady,

     I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain.  There
he sat; and all he could do --for all my polite arts and blandishments --he
would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor
notice my presence in any the slightest way.  I wonder, thought I, if this can
possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast on their hams that way in his
native island.  It must be so; yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; 
well, then, let him rest; he'll get up sooner or later, no doubt.  It can't
last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I
don't believe it's very punctual then.  I went down to supper.  After sitting a
long time listening to the long stories of some sailors who had just come from
a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in
a schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean
only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock,
I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination.  But no; there he was
just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch.  I began to grow
vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting
there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece
of wood on his head.  For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself;
get up and have some supper.  You'll starve; you'll kill yourself,
Queequeg.  But not a word did he reply.  Despairing of him, therefore, I
determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a great while, he
would follow me.  But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin
jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he
had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on.  For some time, do all I would,
I could not get into the faintest doze.  I had blown out the candle; and the
mere thought of Queequeg--
not four feet off --sitting there in that uneasy position, stark alone in
the cold and dark; this made me really wretched.  Think of it; sleeping all
night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary,
unaccountable Ramadan!  But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing
more till break of day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted
Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor.  But as soon as the
first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating
joints, but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed
his forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.  Now, as I
before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it
may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person,
because that other person don't believe it also.  But when a man's religion
becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine,
makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it
high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.  And
just so I now did with Queequeg.  Queequeg, said I, get into bed now, and
lie and listen to me.  I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress
of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the
present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these
Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were
stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in
short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense.  I told him, too, that
he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it
pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about
this ridiculous Ramadan of his.  Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body
cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must
necessarily be half-starved.  This is the reason why most dyspeptic
religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters.  In one
word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on
an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the
hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia;
expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in.  He said no;
only upon one memorable occasion.  It was after a great feast given by his
father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the enemy
had been killed by about two o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and
eaten that very evening.  No more, Queequeg, said I, shuddering; that will
do; for I knew the inferences without his further hinting them.  I had seen
a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the
custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain
in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed
in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit
and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent round with
the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents
were so many Christmas turkeys.  After all, I do not think that my remarks
about religion made much impression upon Queequeg.  Because, in the first
place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless
considered from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not
more than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and,
finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion
than I did.  He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and
compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young
man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.  At last we rose
and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders
of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of
his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and
picking our teeth with halibut bones.

     As we were walking down the end of the wharf
towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff
voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend
was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board
that craft, unless they previously produced their papers.  What do you mean
by that, Captain Peleg?  said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my
comrade standing on the wharf.  I mean, he replied, he must show his
papers.  Yea, said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head
from behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam.  He must show that he's converted.
Son of darkness, he added, turning to Queequeg, art thou at present in
communion with any christian church?  Why, said I, he's a member of the
first Congregational Church.  Here be it said, that many tattooed savages
sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches.

     First Congregational Church, cried Bildad, what!  that worships in Deacon
Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?  and so saying, taking out his
spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and
putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly
over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg.  How long hath he been
a member?  he then said, turning to me; not very long, I rather guess,
young man.  No, said Peleg, and he hasn't been baptized right either, or
it would have washed some of that devil's blue off his face.  Do tell, now,
cried Bildad, is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy's
meeting?  I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord's day.

     I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeeting, said I,

     all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
Congregational Church.  He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.  Young man,
said Bildad sternly, thou art skylarking with me --explain thyself, thou
young Hittite.  What church dost thee mean?  answer me.  Finding myself thus
hard pushed, I replied.  I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to
which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us,
and every mother's son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting
First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that;
only some of us cherish some queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief;

     in that we all join hands.  Splice, thou mean'st splice hands, cried
Peleg, drawing nearer.  Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary,
instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon.  Deacon
Deuteronomy --why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned
something.  Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers.  I say,
tell Quohog there --what's that you call him?  tell Quohog to step along.  By
the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got there!  looks like good stuff that;
and he handles it about right.  I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did
you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat?  did you ever strike a fish?
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the
bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the
side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in
some such way as this: -- Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere?
You see him?  well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!  and taking sharp
aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across
the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.  Now,
said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, spos-ee him whale-e eye; why,
dad whale dead.  Quick, Bildad, said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the

close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.

     Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers.  We must have Hedgehog
there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats.  Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye
the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of

     Nantucket.  So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg
was soon enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.
When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
signing, he turned to me and said, I guess Quohog there don't know how to
write, does he?  I say, Quohog, blast ye!  dost thou sign thy name or make thy
mark?  But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered
pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a
queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain
Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like
this: -- Quohog his mark.  Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and
steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the
huge pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts,
and selecting one entitled The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose, placed
it in queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, Son of darkness, I must do my
duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the souls
of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly
fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman.  Spurn the idol
Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye,
I say; oh!  goodness gracious!  steer clear of the fiery pit!  Something of
the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language, heterogeneously mixed with
Scriptural and domestic phrases.  Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now
spoiling our harpooneer,
cried Peleg.  Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers --it takes the shark
out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish.  There
was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and
the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good.  He got so
frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from
whales, for fear of after-claps in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.

     Peleg!  Peleg!  said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, thou thyself, as
I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to
have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this ungodly guise.
Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg.  Tell me, when this same Pequod here had
her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when
thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not think of Death and the
Judgment then?  Hear him, hear him now, cried Peleg, marching across the
cabin, and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets, -- hear him, all of
ye.  Think of that!  When every moment we thought the ship would sink!  Death
and the judgment then?  What?  With all three masts making such an everlasting
thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft.
Think of Death and the Judgment then?  No!  no time to think about Death then.

     Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands
--how to rig jury-masts -- how to get into the nearest port; that was what I
was thinking of.  Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on

     deck, where we followed him.  There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
sail-makers who were mending a top-sail in the waist.  Now and then he
stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise
might have been wasted.

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

     You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose, said I, trying to gain a little more
time for an uninterrupted look at him.  Aye, the Pequod --that ship there, he
said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out
from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the
object.  Yes, said I, we have just signed the articles.  Anything down
there about your souls?  About what?  Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any, he
said quickly.  no matter though, i know many chaps that hav'n't got any,
--good luck to 'em; and they are all the better off for it.  A soul's a sort
of a fifth wheel to a wagon.  What are you jabbering about, shipmate?  said
I.  He's got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in
other chaps, abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the
word he.  Queequeg, said I, let's go; this fellow has broken loose from
somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know.

     Stop!  cried the stranger.  Ye said true --ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder yet,
have ye?  Who's Old Thunder?  said I, again riveted with the insane
earnestness of his manner.  Captain Ahab.  What!  the captain of our ship,
the Pequod?  Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name.
Ye hav'n't seen him yet, have ye?  No, we hav'n't.  He's sick they say, but
is getting better, and will be all right again before long.  All right again
before long!  laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh.

     Look ye; when captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be
all right; not before.  What do you know about him?  What did they tell
you about him?  Say that!  They didn't tell much of anything about him; only
I've heard that he's a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.

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

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

     All about it, eh --sure you do? --all?  Pretty sure.  With finger pointed
and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger stood a moment, as if
in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and said: -- Ye've
shipped, have ye?  Names down on the papers?  Well, well, what's signed, is
signed; and what's to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it wont be, after
all.  Any how, it's all fixed and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or
other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity
'em!  Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm
sorry I stopped ye.  Look here, friend, said I, if you have anything
important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle
us, you are mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say.  And it's said
very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are just the man
for him --the likes of ye.  Morning to ye, shipmates, morning!  Oh, when ye get
there, tell 'em I've concluded not to make one of 'em.  Ah, my dear fellow,
you can't fool us that way --you can't fool us.  It is the easiest thing in
the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.  Morning to
ye, shipmates, morning.  Morning it is, said I. Come along, Queequeg,
let's leave this crazy man.  But stop, tell me your name, will you?

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

     and on that side of it retraced our steps.  But Elijah passed on, without
seeming to notice us.  This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it
seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.

     A day or two passed, and there was great
activity aboard the pequod.  not only were the old sails being mended, but
new sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging;
in short, everything betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a
close.  Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam
keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and
providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging
were working till long after night-fall.  On the day following Queequeg's
signing the articles, word was given at all the inns where the ship's company
were stopping, that their chests must be on board before night, for there
was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing.  So Queequeg and I got
down our traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last.  But it
seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not
sail for several days.  But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
there
is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully
equipped.  Every one knows what a multitude of things --beds, sauce-pans,
knives and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
indispensable to the business of housekeeping.  Just so with whaling, which
necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all
grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers.  And though this also
holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as
with whalemen.  For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the
numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the
impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it
must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed
to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the
very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends.  Hence, the
spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings,
almost, but a spare captain and duplicate ship.  At the period of our arrival
at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had been almost completed;
comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves.  But, as
before hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on
board of divers odds and ends of things, both large and small.  Chief among
those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad's sister, a lean
old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very
kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she could help it, nothing should
be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea.  At one time
she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry;
another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where he kept
his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one's
rheumatic back.  Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was
Charity --Aunt Charity, as everybody called her.  And like a sister of
charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither,
ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety,
comfort, and consolation to all on board
a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she
herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.  But it was startling to
see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last
day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in
the other.  Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward.  As for
Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles needed, and at
every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper.

     Every once and a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring
at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head,
and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.  During these days of
preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as often I asked
about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come on board
his ship.  To these questions they would answer, that he was getting better
and better, and was expected aboard every day; meantime, the two Captains,
Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for
the voyage.  If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen
very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to
so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the
absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea.
But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be
already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his
suspicions even from himself.  And much this way it was with me.  I said
nothing, and tried to think nothing.  At last it was given out that some time
next day the ship would certainly sail.  So next morning, Queequeg and I took
a very early start.

     It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey
imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf.  There are some sailors
running ahead there, if I see right, said I to Queequeg, it can't be
shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess; come on!  Avast!  cried a voice,
whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid a hand upon both our
shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a
little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me.  It
was Elijah.  Going aboard?  Hands off, will you, said I. Lookee here,
said Queequeg, shaking himself, go 'way!  Aint going aboard, then?  Yes,
we are, said I, but what business is that of yours?  Do you know, Mr.
Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?  No, no, no; I wasn't
aware of that, said elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to
Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.  Elijah, said I, you will
oblige my friend and me by withdrawing.  We are going to the Indian and Pacific
Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained.  Ye be, be ye?  Coming back
afore breakfast?  He's cracked, Queequeg, said I, come on.  Holloa!
cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces.  Never
mind him, said I, Queequeg, come on.  But he stole up to us again, and
suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said -- Did ye see anything looking
like men going towards that ship a while ago?  Struck by this plain
matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying,

     Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.

     Very dim, very dim, said Elijah.  Morning to ye.  Once more we quitted him;
but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder again, said,

     See if you can find 'em now, will ye?  Find who?  Morning to ye!  morning
to ye!  he rejoined, again moving off.  Oh!  I was going to warn ye against
--but never mind, never mind --it's all one, all in the family too; --sharp
frost this morning, ain't it?  Good bye to ye.  Shan't see ye again very
soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand Jury.  And with these cracked
words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment
at his frantic impudence.  At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found
everything in profound quiet, not a soul moving.  The cabin entrance was
locked within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging.
Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open.
Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a
tattered pea-jacket.  He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face
downwards and inclosed in his folded arms.  The profoundest slumber slept
upon him.  Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?
said I, looking dubiously at the sleeper.  But it seemed that, when on the
wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would
have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it
not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question.  But I beat the thing down;
and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we
had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly.
He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was soft
enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.  Gracious!
Queequeg, don't sit there, said I. Oh!  perry dood seat, said Queequeg, my
country way; won't hurt him face.  Face!  said I, call that his face?  very
benevolent countenance
then; but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg,
you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor.  Get off, Queequeg!  Look,
he'll twitch you off soon.  I wonder he don't wake.  Queequeg removed himself
to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his tomahawk pipe.  I sat
at the feet.  We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the
other.  Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave
me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas
of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the
custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a
house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy
fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves.  Besides, it was very
convenient on an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are
convertible into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant,
and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps
in some damp marshy place.  While narrating these things, every time Queequeg
received the tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the
sleeper's head.  What's that for, Queequeg?  Perry easy, kill-e; oh!  perry
easy!  He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his
soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger.  The strong
vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him.
He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose;
then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes.  Holloa!

     he breathed at last, who be ye smokers?  Shipped men, answered I, when
does she sail?  Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye?  She sails to-day.
The Captain came aboard last night.  What Captain? --Ahab?  Who but him
indeed?
I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a
noise on deck.  Halloa!  Starbuck's astir, said the rigger.  He's a lively
chief mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn
to.  And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.  It was now clear
sunrise.  Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the riggers
bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and several of the
shore people were busy in bringing various last things on board.  Meanwhile
Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin.

     At length, towards noon, upon the
final dismissal of the ship's riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled
out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a
whaleboat, with her last gift --a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her
brother-in-law, and a spare bible for the steward -- after all this, the two
captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief
mate, Peleg said: Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right?
Captain Ahab is all ready --just spoke to him --nothing more to be got from
shore, eh?  Well, call all hands, then.  Muster 'em aft here --blast 'em!  No
need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg, said Bildad, but
away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.  How now!  Here upon the
very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were
going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be
joint-commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port.  And, as for
Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen; Only, they said he was in the
cabin.  But then, the idea was,
that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship under weigh,
and steering her well out to sea.  Indeed, as that was not at all his proper
business, but the pilot's; and as he was not yet completely recovered --so
they said --therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below.  And all this seemed natural
enough; especially as in the merchant service many captains never show
themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but
remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merrymaking with their shore
friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot.  But there was
not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all
alive.  He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.

     Aft here, ye sons of bachelors, he cried, as the sailors lingered at the
main-mast.  Mr. Starbuck, drive 'em aft.  Strike the tent there! --was the
next order.  As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched
except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to
strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.

     Man the capstan!  Blood and thunder! --jump! --was the next command, and the
crew sprang for the handspikes.  Now, in getting under weigh, the station
generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the ship.  And here
Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other offices, was
one of the licensed pilots of the port --he being suspected to have got himself
made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was
concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft --Bildad, I say, might now
be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor,
and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the
hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls
in Booble Alley, with hearty good will.  Nevertheless, not three days
previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed on
board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his
sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman's berth.
Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg
ripped and swore astern in the most frightful manner.  I almost thought he
would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused
on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we
both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot.  I was
comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be
found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay;
when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified
at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my
immediate vicinity.  That was my first kick.  Is that the way they heave in
the marchant service?  he roared.  Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and
break thy backbone!  why don't ye spring, i say, all of ye--spring!  Quohog!
spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotchcap; spring,
thou green pants.  Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!  And
so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very
freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody.  Thinks
I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.  At last the anchor
was up, the sails were set, and off we glided.  It was a short, cold
Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found
ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us
in ice, as in polished armor.  The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks
glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge
elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.  Lank Bildad, as pilot,
headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into
the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds
howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard, -- Sweet fields
beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green.  So to the Jews old
Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between.  Never did those sweet words sound
more sweetly to me than then.  They were full of hope and fruition.  Spite of
this frigid
winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter
jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in
store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by
the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.  At last we gained such
an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer.  The stout sail-boat
that had accompanied us began ranging alongside.  It was curious and not
unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially
Captain Bildad.  For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a
ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage --beyond both stormy Capes; a ship
in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in
which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once
more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say
good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him, --poor old
Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides" ran down into the
cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked
to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the
far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land, looked aloft;
looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last,
mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by
the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in
his face, as much as to say, Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it;
yes, I can.  As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but
for all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the
lantern came too near.  And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck
--now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.  But, at
last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him, -- Captain
Bildad --come, old shipmate, we must go.  Back the main-yard there!  Boat ahoy!
Stand by to come close alongside, now!  Careful, careful! --come, Bildad, boy
--say your last.  Luck to ye, Starbuck --luck to ye, Mr. Stubb --luck to ye,

Mr. Flask --good-bye, and good luck to ye all --and this day three years I'll
have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket.  Hurrah and away!  God
bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men, murmured old Bildad, almost
incoherently.  I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may
soon be moving among ye --a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye'll have
plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go.  Be careful in the hunt, ye mates.
Don't stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is
raised full three per cent.  within the year.  Don't forget your prayers,
either.  Mr Starbuck, mind that cooper don't waste the spare staves.  Oh!  the
sail-needles are in the green locker!  Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days,
men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good
gifts.  Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky,
I thought.  If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication.
Good-bye, good-bye!  Don't keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr.
Starbuck; it'll spoil.  Be careful with the butter --twenty cents the pound it
was, and mind ye, if-- Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering, --away!
and with that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the
boat.  Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three
heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

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

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

     As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked
in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come

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

     and

     pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000

     pounds?  And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber
all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of
seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, 20,000,000

     dollars; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars.  How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in
whaling?  But this is not the half; look again.  I freely assert, that the
cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful
influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially
upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty
business of whaling.  One way and another, it has begotten events so
remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential
issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
offspring themselves pregnant from her womb.  It would be a hopeless, endless
task to catalogue all these things.  Let a handful suffice.  For many
years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest
and least known parts of the earth.  She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed.  If American
and european men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them
fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed
them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.  They may
celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes,
Your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed
out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cooke and your
Krusenstern.  For in their succorless emptyhandedness, they, in the
heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands,
battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and
muskets would not willingly have dared.  All that is made such a flourish of
in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the lifetime commonplaces
of our heroic Nantucketers.  Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three
chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's
common log.  Ah, the world!  Oh, the world!  Until the whale fishery rounded
Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial,
was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish
provinces on the Pacific coast.  It was the whaleman who first broke through
the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if
space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last
eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old
Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.  That
great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the
enlightened world by the whaleman.  After its first blunder-born discovery by
a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously
barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there.  The whale-ship is the true
mother of that now mighty colony.  Moreover, in the infancy of the first
Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved
from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping
an anchor in their waters.  The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the
same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way
for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive
missionaries to their first destinations.  If that double-bolted land, Japan,
is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit
will be due; for already she is on the threshold.  But if, in the face of all
this, you still declare that whaling has no aesthetically noble associations
connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there,
and unhorse you with a split helmet every time.  The whale has no famous
author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.  The whale no

     famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler?  Who wrote the first
account of our Leviathan?  Who but mighty Job!  And who composed the first
narrative of a whaling-voyage?  Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the
Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the
Norwegian whale-hunter of those times!  And who pronounced our glowing eulogy
in Parliament?  Who, but Edmund Burke!  True enough, but then whalemen
themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their veins.  No good

     blood in their veins?  They have something better than royal blood there.
The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel" afterwards, by marriage,
Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a
long line of Folgers and harpooneers --all kith and kin to noble Benjamin
--this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.

     Whaling not respectable?  Whaling is imperial!  By old English statutory
law, the whale is declared a royal fish.
Oh, that's only nominal!  The whale himself has never figured in any grand
imposing way.  The whale never figured in any grand imposing way?  In
one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the
world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian
coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.  Grant
it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in
whaling.  No dignity in whaling?  The dignity of our calling the very
heavens attest.  Cetus is a constellation in the South!  No more!  Drive down
your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg!  No more!  I
know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales.  I
account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who
boasted of taking as many walled towns.  And, as for me, if, by any
possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall
ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might
not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that,
upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at
my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS.
in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to
whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.

     In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I
would fain advance naught but substantiated facts.  But after embattling his
facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable
surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause --such an advocate, would
he not be blameworthy?  It is well known that at the coronation of kings and
queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for
their functions is gone through.  There is a saltcellar of state, so called,
and there may be a caster of state.  How they use the salt, precisely --who
knows?  Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his
coronation, even as a head of salad.  Can it be, though, that they anoint it
with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?  Much
might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal
process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a
fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing.  In truth,

     a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got
a quoggy spot in him somewhere.  As a general rule, he can't amount to much in

     his totality.  But the only thing to be considered here, is this --what kind
of oil is used at coronations?  Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar
oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil.  What
then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted
state, the sweetest of all oils?  Think of that, ye loyal Britons!  we
whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

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

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

     them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased,
among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall
touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a
rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear
me out in it, thou just spirit of equality, which hast spread one royal
mantle of humanity over all my kind!  Bear me out in it, thou great democratic

     God!  who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic
pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the
stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew
Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst
thunder him higher than a throne!  Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly
marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear
me out in it, O God!

     Stubb was the second mate.  He
was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a
Cape-Cod-man.  A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as

     they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent
crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner
engaged for the year.  Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew
all invited guests.  He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of
his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box.

     When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his
unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.
He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most
exasperated monster.  Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of
death into an easy chair.  What he thought of death itself, there is no
telling.  Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if
he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no
doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to
tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find
out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.  What, perhaps, with other
things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off
with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the
ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious
good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe.  For, like his nose,
his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face.  You
would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
nose as without his pipe.
He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy
reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in
succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then
loading them again to be in readiness anew.  For, when Stubb dressed, instead
of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the
numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera,
some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so,
likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have
operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.  The third mate was Flask, a native
of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard.  A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very
pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great
Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it
was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.
So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their
majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension
of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the
wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat,
requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and
trouble in order to kill and boil.  This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of
his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these
fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a
jolly joke that lasted that length of time.  As a carpenter's nails are
divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided.

     Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last
long.  They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form,
he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those
battering seas.  Now these three mates --Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were
momentous men.  They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of
the Pequod's boats as headsmen.  In that grand order of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
these three headsmen were as captains of companies.  Or, being armed with
their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even
as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.  And since in this famous
fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always
accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures
provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted,
or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between
the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in
this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what
headsman each of them belonged.  first of all was queequeg, whom Starbuck, the
chief mate, had selected for his squire.  But Queequeg is already known.  Next
was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of
Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of
red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with
many of her most daring harpooneers.  In the fishery, they usually go by the
generic name of Gay-Headers.  Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high
cheek bones, and black rounding eyes --for an Indian, Oriental in their
largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression --all this
sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those
proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had
scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main.  But no longer
snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of
the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires.  To look at the
tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the
superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild
Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air.  Tashtego was Stubb
the second mate's squire.  Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic,
coal-black
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread --an Ahasuerus to behold.  Suspended from
his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them
ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them.  In his
youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely
bay on his native coast.  And never having been anywhere in the world but in
Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and
having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of
owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; daggoo retained
all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in
all the pomp of six feet five in his socks.  There was a corporeal humility
in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag
come to beg truce of a fortress.  Curious to tell, this imperial negro,
Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
beside him.  As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at
the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast
employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty
nearly all the officers are.  Herein it is the same with the American whale
fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the
engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and
Railroads.  The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American
liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying
the muscles.  No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores,
where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their
crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores.  In like manner, the
Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland
Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew.  Upon the passage
homewards, they drop them there again.  How it is, there is no telling, but
Islanders seem to make the best whalemen.  They were nearly all Islanders in
the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common
continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his
own.  Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!  An
Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the
isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the
pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many
of them ever come back.  Black Little Pip --he never did --oh, no!  he went
before.  Poor Alabama boy!  On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere
long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when
sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with
angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a
hero there!

     For several days after leaving Nantucket,
nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab.  The mates regularly relieved
each other at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary,
they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued
from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was
plain they but commanded vicariously.  Yes, their supreme lord and dictator
was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into
the now sacred retreat of the cabin.  Every time I ascended to the deck from my
watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were
visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in
the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation.  This was strangely
heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of.
But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready
to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the
wharves.  But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness --to call it so
--which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed
against all warrantry to
cherish such emotions.  For though the harpooneers, with the great body of
the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, still I ascribed this --and rightly ascribed it --to the
fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in
which I had so abandonedly embarked.  But it was especially the aspect of the
three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly
calculated to allay these colorless misgivings, and induce confidence and
cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.  Three better, more likely
sea-officers and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be
found, and they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a
Vineyarder, a Cape man.  Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out
her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time
running away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of
latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all
its intolerable weather behind us.  It was one of those less lowering, but
still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind
the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and
melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon
watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding
shivers ran over me.  Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon
his quarter-deck.  There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him,
nor of the recovery from any.  He looked like a man cut away from the stake,
when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.  His whole
high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable
mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus.  Threading its way out from among his grey
hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck,
till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly
whitish.  It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the
straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning
tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and
grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil,
leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.  Whether that mark was born
with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one
could certainly say.  By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no
allusion was made to it, especially by the mates.  But once Tashtego's
senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that
not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and
then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an
elemental strife at sea.  Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived,
by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never
before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab.
Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly
invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment.  So that
no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain
Ahab should be tranquilly laid out --which might hardly come to pass, so he
muttered --then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a
birth-mark on him from crown to sole.  So powerfully did the whole grim aspect
of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first
few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was
owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood.  It had previously
come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished
bone of the sperm whale's jaw.  Aye, he was dismasted off Japan, said the
old Gay-Head Indian once; but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
mast without coming home for it.  he has a quiver of 'em.  I was struck with
the singular posture he maintained.  Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter
deck, and pretty close to the mizen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored
about half an inch or so, into the plank.  His bone leg steadied in that hole;

     one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking
straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow.  There was an infinity of
firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable
wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.  Not
a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their
minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not
painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye.  And not only
that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his
face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.  Ere
long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.  But after
that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his
pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the
deck.  As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he
became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from
home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so
secluded.  And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in
the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at
last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast.  But the
Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all
whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to,
so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab,
now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon
layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks
to pile themselves upon.  Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling
persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually
to charm him from his mood.  For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls,
April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest,
ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green
sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a
little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air.  More than once
did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would
have soon flowered out in a smile.

     Some days elapsed, and ice
and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito
spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the
eternal August of the Tropic.  The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed,
overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet,
heaped up --flaked up, with rose-water snow.  The starred and stately nights
seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the
memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!  For
sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such
seducing nights.  But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not
merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world.  Inward they turned
upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then,
memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.
And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man
has to do with aught that looks like death.  among sea-commanders, the old
greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck.
It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in
the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than
from, the cabin to the planks.  It feels like going down into one's tomb,
--he would mutter to himself, -- for an old captain like me to be descending
this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth.  So, almost every
twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on
deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be
hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day,

but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place, for fear of disturbing
their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to
prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and
ere long the old man would emerge, griping at the iron banister, to help his
crippled way.  Some considerating touch of humanity was in him; for at times
like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to
his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such
would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their
dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks.  But once, the mood
was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like
pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the odd
second mate, came up from below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating
humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks,
then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the
noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow,
and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel.  Ah!  Stubb, thou did'st not
know Ahab then.  Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb, said Ahab, that thou wouldst
wad me that fashion?  But go thy ways; I had forgot.  Below to thy nightly
grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one
at last. --Down, dog, and kennel!  Starting at the unforeseen concluding
exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a
moment; then said excitedly, I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir;
I do but less than half like it, sir.  Avast!  gritted Ahab between his set
teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.

     No, sir; not yet, said Stubb, emboldened, I will not tamely be called a
dog, sir.  Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and
begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!  As he said this, Ahab advanced upon
him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily
retreated.  I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,
muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.

     It's very queer.  Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go
back and strike him, or --what's that? -- down here on my knees and pray for
him?  Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first
time I ever did pray.  It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too; aye,
take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed
with.  How he flashed at me! --his eyes like powder-pans!  is he mad?  Anyway
there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck
when it cracks.  He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of
the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then.  Didn't that Dough-Boy, the
steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock
clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the
coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as
though a baked brick had been on it?  A hot old man!  I guess he's got what
some folks ashore call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say
--worse nor a toothache.  Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord
keep me from catching it.  He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into
the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's
that for, I should like to know?  Who's made appointments with him in the hold?

     Ain't that queer, now?  But there's no telling, it's the old game --Here goes

     for a snooze.  Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the
world, if only to fall right asleep.  And now that I think of it, that's
about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too.  Damn me,
but all things are queer, come to think of 'em.  But that's against my
principles.  Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can,
is my twelfth -- So here goes again.  But how's that?  didn't he call me a dog?

     blazes!  he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on
top of that!  He might as well have kicked me, and done with it.  Maybe he

     did kick me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow,
somehow.  It flashed like a bleached bone.  What the devil's the matter with
me?  I don't stand right on my legs.  Coming afoul of that old man has a sort
of turned me wrong side out.  By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though
--How?  how?  how? --but the only way's
to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll see how
this plaguey juggling thinks over by day-light.

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

     Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.  Such a
queer dream, King-Post, I never had.  You know the old man's ivory leg, well
I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul,
my little man, I kicked my leg right off!  And then, presto!  Ahab seemed a
pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it.  But what was still
more curious, Flask--you know how curious all dreams are-- through all this rage
that I was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it
was not much of an insult, that kick from ahab.  "Why," thinks I,"what's the
row?  It's not a real leg, only a false leg."  And there's a mighty difference
between a living thump and a dead thump.  That's what makes a blow from the
hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane.  The
living member --that makes the living insult, my little man.  And thinks I to
myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that
cursed pyramid -- so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I
say, I was thinking to myself, "what's his leg now, but a cane --a whalebone
cane.  Yes," thinks I,"it was only a playful cudgelling --in fact, only a
whaleboning that he gave me --not a base kick.  Besides," thinks I,"look at it
once; why, the end of it --the foot part --what a small sort of end it is;
whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me, there's a devilish broad insult.

     But this insult is whittled down to a point only."  But now comes the
greatest joke of the dream, Flask.  While I was battering away at the
pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes
me by the shoulders, and slews me round.  "What are you 'bout?" says he.  Slid!
man, but I was frightened.  Such a phiz!  But, somehow, next moment I was over
the fright.  "What am I about?" says I at last.  "And what business is that of
yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback?  Do you want a
kick?"  By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round
his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a
clout --what do you think, I saw? --why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck
full of marlinspikes, with the points out.  Says I, on second thoughts,"I
guess I won't kick you, old fellow." "Wise Stubb," said he,"wise Stubb;" and
kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a
chimney hag.  seeing he wasn't going to stop saying over his "wise Stubb, wise
Stubb," I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again.  But I
had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, "Stop that kicking!"
"Halloa," says I,"what's the matter now, old fellow?" "Look ye here," says
he;"let's argue the insult.  Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?" "Yes, he
did," says I --"right here it was." "Very good," says he --"he used his ivory

     leg, didn't he?" "Yes, he did," says I. "Well then," says he, "wise Stubb,
what have you to complain of?  Didn't he kick with right good will?  it wasn't
a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it?  No, you were kicked by a
great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb.  It's an honor; I consider
it an honor.  Listen, wise Stubb.  In old England the greatest lords think it
great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be

     your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of.
Remember what I say; be kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no
account kick back; for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb.  Don't you see
that pyramid?"  With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer
fashion, to swim off into the air.  I snored; rolled over; and there I was
in my hammock!  Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?  I don't know;
it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho'.  May be, may be.  But it's made a
wise man of me, Flask.  D'ye see Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the
stern?  Well, the best thing you can do, Flask, is to let that old man alone;
never speak to him, whatever he says.  Halloa!  what's that he shouts?  Hark!

     Mast-head, there!  Look sharp, all of ye!  There are whales hereabouts!  If
ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!  What d'ye think of that now,
Flask?  ain't there a small drop
of something queer about that, eh?  a white whale--did ye mark that, man?  Look
ye--there's something special in the wind.  Stand by for it, Flask.  Ahab has
that that's bloody on his mind.  But, mum; he comes this way.

     Already we are boldly launched upon the
deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.  Ere

     that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the
barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a
matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the
more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to
follow.  It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,
that I would now fain put before you.  Yet is it no easy task.  The
classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.
Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.  No branch of
Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology, says Captain
Scoresby, A. D.
.  It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter
into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups
and families....  Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal
(sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A. D.
.  Unfitness to pursue our
research in the unfathomable waters.  Impenetrable veil covering our
knowledge of the cetacea.  A field strewn with thorns.  All these
incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists.  Thus speak of
the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of
zoology and anatomy.  Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little,
yet of books there are
a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of
whales.  many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen,

     who have at large or in little, written of the whale.  Run over a few: --The
Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne;
Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald;
Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick
Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the
Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev.  T. Cheever.  But to what
ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts
will show.  Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following
Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
harpooneer and whaleman.  I mean Captain Scoresby.  On the separate subject of
the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority.  But Scoresby
knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which
the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning.  And here be it said, that
the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas.  He is not even
by any means the largest of the whales.  Yet, owing to the long priority of
his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back,
invested the then fabulous and utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which
ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific
retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete.
Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past
days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to
them the monarch of the seas.  But the time has at last come for a new
proclamation.  This is Charing Cross; hear ye!  good people all, --the
Greenland whale is deposed, --the great sperm whale now reigneth!  There are
only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale
before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the
attempt.  Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in their time surgeons
to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men.  The
original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is
necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality,
though mostly confined to scientific description.  As yet, however, the sperm
whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature.  Far above
all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.  Now the various species of
whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy
outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by
subsequent laborers.  As no better man advances to take this matter in hand,
I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors.  I promise nothing complete; because
any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly
be faulty.  I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the
various species, or-- in this place at least --to much of any description.  My
object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology.

     I am the architect, not the builder.  But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary
letter-sorter in the Post-office is equal to it.  To grope down into the
bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable
foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing.
What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan!  The awful
tauntings in Job might well appal me.  Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant
with thee?  Behold the hope of him is vain!  But I have swam through
libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these
visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try.  There are some
preliminaries to settle.  first: the uncertain, unsettled condition of this
science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in
some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish.  In his
System of Nature, A. D.
, Linnaeus declares, I hereby separate the whales
from the fish.  But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year
,
sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, were
still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.  The
grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished
the whales from the waters, he states as follows: On account of their warm
bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
intrantem feminam mammis lactantem, and finally, ex lege naturae jure
meritoque.  I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they
united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient.

     Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.  Be it known that, waiving all
argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and
call upon holy Jonah to back me.  This fundamental thing settled, the next
point is, in what internal respect does the whale differ from other fish.
Above, Linnaeus has given you those items.  But in brief, they are these:
lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
conspicuously to label him for all time to come?  To be short, then, a whale
is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.  There you have him.
However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation.  A
walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is
amphibious.  but the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as
coupled with the first.  Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish
familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail.
Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped,
invariably assumes a horizontal position.  By the above definition of what a
whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea
creature hitherto identified with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers;

     nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively
regarded as alien.  Hence, all the smaller, spouting,
and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology.
Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host.  First:
According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS
(subdivisible into Chapters), and these shall comprehend them all, both small
and large.  I. The FOLIO WHALE; II.  the OCTAVO WHALE;  III.  the DUODECIMO
WHALE.  As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the
OCTAVO, the Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.  FOLIOS.  Among these I
here include the following chapters: -- I. The Sperm Whale; II.  the Right

     Whale; III.  the Fin Back Whale; IV.  the Hump-backed Whale; V. the

     Razor Back Whale; VI.  the Sulphur Bottom Whale.  BOOK I. ( Folio),
CHAPTER I. ( Sperm Whale). --This whale, among the English of old vaguely
known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale,
is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and
the Macrocephalus of the Long Words.  He is, without doubt, the largest
inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the
most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce;
he being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
obtained.  All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon.

     It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do.  Philologically considered,
it is absurd.  Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly
unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only
accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it
would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical
with the one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale.  It was
the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the
Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses.  In
those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for
light, but only as an ointment and medicament.  It was only to be had from the

     druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb.  When, as I opine, in the
course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became
known, its original name was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to
enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity.  And
so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from
which this spermaceti was really derived.  BOOK I. ( Folio), CHAPTER II.
( Right Whale).--In one respect this is the most venerable of the
leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man.  It yields the
article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as

     whale oil, an inferior article in commerce.  Among the fishermen, he is
indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the
Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right
whale.  there is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species
thus multitudinously baptized.  What then is the whale, which I include in
the second species of my Folios?  It is the Great Mysticetus of the English
naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English Whalemen; the Baliene
Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes.  It is
the whale which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch
and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen
have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor' West
Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale
Cruising Grounds.  Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland
whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans.  But they precisely
agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction.  It is by endless
subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some
departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.  The right
whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to
elucidating the sperm whale.  BOOK I. ( Folio), CHAPTER III. ( Fin-Back).
--Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various names of
Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is
commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers
crossing the Atlantic, in the New York
packet-tracks.  In the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back
resembles the right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter
color, approaching to olive.  His great lips present a cable-like aspect,
formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds of large wrinkles.  His grand
distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name, is often a
conspicuous object.  this fin is some three or four feet long, growing
vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a
very sharp pointed end.  Even if not the slightest other part of the creature
be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from
the surface.  When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with
spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon
the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle
surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines
graved on it.  On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back.  The Fin-Back is
not gregarious.  He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters.  Very
shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the
remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising
like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such
wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from
man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race,
bearing for his mark that style upon his back.  From having the baleen in his
mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a
theoretic species denominated Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen.

     Of these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several
varieties, most of which, however, are little known.  Broad-nosed whales and
beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and
rostrated whales, are the fishermen's names for a few sorts.  In connexion
with this appellative of Whalebone whales , it is of great importance to
mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating
allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear
classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or
fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very
obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of
Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his
kinds, presents.  How then?  The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are
things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of
whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in
other and more essential particulars.  Thus, the sperm whale and the
humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases.  Then,
this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen;
but there again the similitude ceases.  And it is just the same with the other
parts above mentioned.  In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular
combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular
isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a
basis.  On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has split.  But it
may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in his
anatomy --there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification.
Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale's anatomy more
striking than his baleen?  Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is
impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale.  And if you descend
into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you will not find
distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the systematizer as those
external ones already enumerated.  What then remains?  nothing but to take hold
of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them
that way.  And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the
only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable.  To proceed.

     book i. ( folio), chapter iv. ( hump back). --this whale is often seen on
the northern American coast.  He has been frequently captured there, and towed
into harbor.  He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call
him the Elephant and Castle whale.  At any rate, the popular name for him does

     not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump,
though a smaller one.  His oil is not very valuable.  He has baleen.  He is
the most gamesome and light-hearted of all
the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of
them.  BOOK I. ( Folio), CHAPTER V. ( Razor Back). --Of this whale little is
known but his name.  I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn.  Of a
retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers.  Though no coward,
he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises in a long
sharp ridge.  Let him go.  I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.
BOOK I. ( Folio), CHAPTER VI. ( Sulphur Bottom). -- Another retiring
gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings.  He is seldom seen; at
least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then
always at too great a distance to study his countenance.  He is never chased;
he would run away with rope-walks of line.  Prodigies are told of him.  Adieu,
Sulphur Bottom!  I can say nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest
Nantucketer.  Thus ends BOOK I. ( Folio), and now begins BOOK II. ( octavo).

     OCTAVOES.  These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which at
present may be numbered: --I., the Grampus; II., the Black Fish; III., the

     Narwhale; IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.  BOOK II. ( Octavo), CHAPTER
I. ( Grampus). --Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather
blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of
the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales.  But possessing all
the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have
recognised him for one.  He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen
to twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the
waist.  He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is
considerable
in quantity, and pretty good for light.  By some fishermen his approach is
regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.  BOOK II.
( Octavo), CHAPTER II. ( Black Fish). --I give the popular fishermen's names
for all these fish, for generally they are the best.  Where any name happens
to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another.  I do so
now, touching the Black Fish, so called, because blackness is the rule among
almost all whales.  So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please.  His voracity
is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips
are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his
face.  This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length.  He is
found in almost all latitudes.  He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal
hooked fin in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose.  When not
more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment --as some
frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by themselves,
burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax.  Though their blubber is very
thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil.
BOOK II. ( Octavo), CHAPTER III. ( Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale.
--Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his
peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose.  The creature is
some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some
exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet.  Strictly speaking, this horn is
but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed
from the horizontal.  But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an
ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy
left-handed man.  What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it
would be hard to say.  It does not seemed to be used like the blade of the
sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale
employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food.  Charley
Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the
surface of the Polar Sea,
and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through.
But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct.  My own opinion
is, that however this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale
--however that may be --it would certainly be very convenient to him for a
folder in reading pamphlets.  The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked
whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale.  He is certainly a curious
example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated
nature.  From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same
sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against
poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices.  It was also
distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the
horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn.  Originally it was in
itself accounted an object of great curiosity.  Black Letter tells me that Sir
Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did
gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as
his bold ship sailed down the Thames; when Sir Martin returned from that
voyage, saith Black Letter, on bended knees he presented to her highness a
prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in
the castle at Windsor.  An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester,
on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining
to a land beast of the unicorn nature.  The Narwhale has a very picturesque,
leopard-like look, being of a milk-white ground color, dotted with round and
oblong spots of black.  His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there
is little of it, and he is seldom hunted.  He is mostly found in the
circumpolar seas.  BOOK II. ( Octavo), CHAPTER IV. ( Killer). --Of this whale
little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the
professed naturalist.  From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should
say that he was about the bigness of a grampus.  He is very savage --a sort of
Feegee fish.  He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs
there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death.  The Killer
is never hunted.  I never heard what sort of oil he has.  Exception
might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its
indistinctness.  For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and
Sharks included.  BOOK II. ( Octavo), CHAPTER V. ( Thrasher). --This gentleman

     is famous for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes.  He
mounts the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage by
flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar
process.  Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer.  Both are
outlaws, even in the lawless seas.  thus ends book II. ( Octavo), and begins
BOOK III. ( Duodecimo).  DUODECIMOES. --These include the smaller whales.  I.

     The Huzza Porpoise.  II.  The Algerine Porpoise.  III.  The Mealy-mouthed
Porpoise.  To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it
may possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
feet should be marshalled among WHALES --a word, which, in the popular sense,
always conveys an idea of hugeness.  But the creatures set down above as
Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition of what a
whale is --i.  e.  a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail.  BOOK III.
( Duodecimo), CHAPTER I ( Huzza Porpoise). -- This is the common porpoise
found almost all over the globe.  The name is of my own bestowal; for there
are more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish

     them.  I call them thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which
upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a
Fourth-of-July crowd.  Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by
the mariner.  Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy
billows to windward.  They are the lads that always live before the wind.  They

     are accounted a lucky omen.  If you yourself can withstand three cheers at
beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly
gamesomeness is not in ye.  A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield you
one good gallon of good oil.  But the fine and delicate fluid extracted from
his jaws is exceedingly valuable.  It is in request among jewellers and
watchmakers.
Sailors put it on their hones.  Porpoise meat is good eating, you know.  It
may never have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts.  Indeed, his spout is
so small that it is not very readily discernible.  But the next time you have
a chance, watch him; and you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in
miniature.  BOOK III. ( Duodecimo), CHAPTER II. ( Algerine Porpoise). -- A
pirate.  Very savage.  He is only found, I think, in the Pacific.  He is
somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make.
Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark.  I have lowered for him many
times, but never yet saw him captured.  BOOK III. ( Duodecimo), CHAPTER III.
( Mealy-mouthed Porpoise).  The largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in
the Pacific, so far as it is known.  The only English name, by which he has
hitherto been designated, is that of the fishers -- Right-Whale Porpoise,
from the circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio.
In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less
rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like
figure.  He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a
lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue.  But his
mealy-mouth spoils all.  Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a
deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull, called
the bright waist, that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two
separate colors, black above and white below.  The white comprises part of his
head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just
escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag.  A most mean and mealy aspect!
His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.  Beyond the DUODECIMO, this
system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the
whales.  Above, you have all the Leviathans of note.  But there are a rabble
of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American
whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally.  I shall enumerate them by
their forecastle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to
future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun.  If any of
the following
whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be
incorporated into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo
magnitude: --The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed
Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale;
the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale;
the Blue Whale; etc.  From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities,
there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all
manner of uncouth names.  But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can
hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but
signifying nothing.  Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system
would not be here, and at once, perfected.  You cannot but plainly see that I
have kept my word.  But I now leave my cetological System standing thus
unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane
still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.  For small erections may
be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the

     copestone to posterity.  God keep me from ever completing anything.  This
whole book is but a draught --nay, but the draught of a draught.  Oh Time,
Strength, Cash, and Patience!
I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and
Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by
many naturalists among the whales.  But as these pig-fish are a nosy,
contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet

     hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as
whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the kingdom of
Cetology.
Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.  Because,
while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former
order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet
the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its diminished form does not preserve the
shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.

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

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

     Dinner, Mr. Starbuck, disappears into the cabin.  When the last echo of his
sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck, the first Emir, has every reason to
suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a
few turns along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says,
with some touch of pleasantness, Dinner, Mr. Stubb, and descends the
scuttle.  The second Emir lounges about the rigging
awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it be all
right with that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with
a rapid Dinner, Mr. Flask, follows after his predecessors.  But the third
emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to feel
relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks
in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp
but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk's head; and
then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a
shelf, he goes down rollicking, so far at least as he remains visible from
the deck, reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music.

     But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face
altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's
presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.  It is not the least
among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of sea-usages,
that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation,
bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet,
ten to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to their customary
dinner in that same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not
to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the
table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical.  Wherefore this
difference?  A problem?  Perhaps not.  To have been Belshazzar, King of
Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur.  But he who
in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private
dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power and dominion of
individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of state transcends
Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest.  Who has but once dined
his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar.  It is a witchery of social
czarship which there is no withstanding.  Now, if to this consideration you
superadd the official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference, you
will derive the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the
white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs.  In
his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served.  They were as little
children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest
social arrogance.  With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old
man's knife, as he carved the chief dish before him.  I do not suppose that
for the world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest
observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the weather.  No!  And when
reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked,
Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his
meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if,
perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly;
and swallowed it, not without circumspection.  For, like the Coronation
banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven

     Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in
awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he
himself was dumb.  What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a
sudden racket in the hold below.  And poor little Flask, he was the youngest
son, and little boy of this weary family party.  His were the shinbones of
the saline beef; his would have been the drumsticks.  For Flask to have
presumed to help himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny
in the first degree.  Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never
more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world;
nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him.  And had Flask helped
himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it.  Least of all,
did flask presume to help himself to butter.  Whether he thought the owners of
the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny
complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless
waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern;
however it was, Flask, alas!  was a butterless man!  Another thing.  Flask was
the last person down at the dinner,
and Flask is the first man up.  Consider!  For hereby Flask's dinner was badly
jammed in point of time.  Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and
yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear.  If Stubb even, who
is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and
soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir
himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it is
against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.  Therefore it was
that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the
dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be
otherwise than hungry, more or less.  For what he ate did not so much relieve
his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.  Peace and satisfaction, thought
Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach.  I am an officer; but, how I
wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to
when I was before the mast.  There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the
vanity of glory: there's the insanity of life!  Besides, if it were so that
any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official
capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was
to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light,
sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.  Now, Ahab and his three
mates formed what may be called the first table in the Pequod's cabin.  After
their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas
cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid
steward.  And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being
its residuary legatees.  They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of the
high and mighty cabin.  In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint
and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire
care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior
fellows the harpooneers.  While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the
sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with
such a relish that there was a report to it.  They dined like lords; they
filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices.  Such
portentous
appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by
the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great
baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox.  And if he were
not lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then
Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his
back, harpoonwise.  And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted
Dough-Boy's memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a
great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out
the circle preliminary to scalping him.  He was naturally a very nervous,
shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a
bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse.  And what with the standing spectacle of
the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these
three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life was one continual lip-quiver.
Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they
demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry
adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door,
till all was over.  It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against
Tashtego, opposing his filed teeth to the Indian's: crosswise to them,
Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed
head to the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the
low cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a
ship.  But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to
say dainty.  It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively small
mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad, baronial,
and superb a person.  But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank
deep of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils
snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds.  Not by beef or by bread, are
giants made or nourished.  But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of
the lip in eating --an ugly sound enough --so much so, that the trembling
Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own
lean arms.  And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce
himself,
that his bones might be picked, the simple-witted Steward all but shattered
the crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the
palsy.  Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets,
for their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner,
they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not
at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy.  How could he forget that in his
Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some
murderous, convivial indiscretions.  Alas!  Dough-Boy!  hard fares the white
waiter who waits upon cannibals.  Not a napkin should he carry on his arm,
but a buckler.  in good time, though, to his great delight, the three
salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering
ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish
scimetars in scabbards.  But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and
nominally lived there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits,
they were scarcely ever in it except at meal-times, and just before
sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains,
who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship's cabin
belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at
any time, permitted there.  So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers
of the Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than
in it.  For when they did enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a
house; turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as
a permanent thing, residing in the open air.  Nor did they lose much hereby;
in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible.  Though
nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it.
He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
Missouri.  And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the
woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there,
sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul,
shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its
gloom!

     It was during the more pleasant weather,
that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-head came round.  In
most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with
the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand
miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground.  and if,
after a three, four, or five years' voyage she is drawing nigh home with
anything empty in her --say, an empty vial even --then, her mast-heads are kept
manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires
of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale
more.  Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a
very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here.  I
take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians;
because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.  For though their
progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have
intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet
(ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be
said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore,
we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians.  And that the
Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the
general belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for
astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar
stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with
prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to
mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a
modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight.  In Saint
Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty
stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of
his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in
him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who
was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet;
but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.

     Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone,
iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale,
are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering
any strange sight.  There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of
Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air;
careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis
Blanc, or Louis the Devil.  Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his
towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his
column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go.
Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in
Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke, token is
yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be
fire.  But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a
single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels
the distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that
their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what

     shoals and what rocks must be shunned.  It may seem unwarrantable to couple in
any respect the mast-head standers of the land with those of the sea; but
that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed
Macy, the sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable.  The worthy Obed
tells us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were
regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected
lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of
nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house.  A few years
ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon
descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach.  But
this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head,
that of a whale-ship
at sea.  The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the
seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other
every two hours.  In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly
pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful.
There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the
deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between
your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships
once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.  There you
stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the
waves.  The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow;
everything resolves you into languor.  For the most part, in this tropic
whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read
no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you
into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt
securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you
shall have for dinner --for all your meals for three years and more are snugly
stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.  In one of those southern
whalemen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of
the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire
months.  And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so
considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so
sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted
to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a
hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those
small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves.  Your
most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallant-mast, where you stand
upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t'
gallant cross-trees.  Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about
as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns.  To be sure, in cold weather
you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but
properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the
unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside
of its fleshly tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move
out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim
crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house
as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you.  You cannot put a
shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a
convenient closet of your watch-coat.  Concerning all this, it is much to be
deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with
those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow's-nests, in which the
lookouts of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of
the frozen seas.  In the fire-side narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled A
Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally
for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland; in
this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a
charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow's-nest
of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good craft.  He called
it the Sleet's crow's-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original
inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and
holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers
being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate
after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget.  In shape, the Sleet's
crow's-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above,
however, where it is furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward
of your head in a hard gale.  Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you
ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom.  On the after side,
or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker
underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats.  In front is a leather rack,
in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical
conveniences.  When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow's
nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in
the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping
off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for
you cannot successfully shoot at them from
the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is
a very different thing.  Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet
to describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his
crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he
treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow's-nest,
with a small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the
errors resulting from what is called the local attraction of all binnacle
magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the
ship's planks, and in the Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so
many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain
is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned binnacle
deviations, azimuth compass observations, and approximate errors, he
knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those
profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards
that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of
his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand.  Though, upon the whole, I
greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet
I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle,
seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with
mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there
in that bird's nest within three or four perches of the pole.  But if we
Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his
Greenland-men were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counterbalanced by the
widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers

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

     ( enter Ahab: Then, all.) It
was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly
after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the
deck.  There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country
gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden.  Soon his
steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon
planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like
geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk.  Did you fixedly gaze,
too, upon that ribbed
and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints --the
foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.  But on the occasion in
question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous step that morning
left a deeper mark.  And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every
uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you

     could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he
paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the
inward mould of every outer movement.  D'ye mark him, Flask?  whispered Stubb;

     the chick that's in him pecks the shell.  T'will soon be out.  The hours
wore on; --Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck, with the
same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.  It drew near the close of day.

     Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into
the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck

     to send everybody aft.  Sir!  said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or
never given on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.  Send everybody
aft, repeated Ahab.  Mast-heads, there!  come down!  When the entire ship's
company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces,
were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is
coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting
his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a
soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck.  With bent head and
half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering
among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have
summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat.  But this
did not last long.  Vehemently pausing, he cried: -- What do ye do when ye see
a whale, men?  Sing out for him!  was the impulsive rejoinder from a score
of clubbed voices.

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

     And what do ye next, men?  Lower away, and after him!  And what tune is
it ye pull to, men?  A dead whale or a stove boat!  More and more strangely
and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every
shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if
marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such
seemingly purposeless questions.  But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab,
now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud,

     and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus: -- All ye
mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale.  Look
ye!  d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold? --holding up a broad bright coin to
the sun -- it is a sixteen dollar piece, men.  D'ye see it?  Mr. Starbuck,
hand me yon top-maul.  While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without
speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket,
as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly
humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate
that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with
the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with
a high raised voice exclaiming: Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed
whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that
white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke --look
ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold
ounce, my boys!  Huzza!  huzza!  cried the seamen, as with swinging
tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.  It's a
white whale, I say, resumed Ahab, as he threw down
the top-maul; a white whale.  Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for
white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.  All this while Tashtego,
Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more intense interest and
surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked
jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific
recollection.  Captain Ahab, said Tashtego, that white whale must be the
same that some call Moby Dick.  Moby Dick?  shouted Ahab.  Do ye know the
white whale then, Tash?  Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he
goes down?  said the Gay-Header deliberately.  And has he a curious spout,
too, said Daggoo, very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick,
Captain Ahab?  And he have one, two, tree --oh!  good many iron in him hide,
too, Captain, cried Queequeg disjointedly, all twiske-tee betwisk, like
him--him-- faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as
though uncorking a bottle -- like him--him-- Corkscrew!  cried Ahab, aye,
Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his
spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our
Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he
fan-tails like a split jib in a squall.  Death and devils!  men, it is Moby
Dick ye have seen --Moby Dick-- Moby Dick!  Captain Ahab, said Starbuck, who,
with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing
surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained
all the wonder.  Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick--but it was not Moby
Dick that took off thy leg?  Who told thee that?  cried Ahab; then pausing,

     Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted
me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.  Aye, aye,
he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken
moose; Aye, aye!  it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a
poor pegging
lubber of me for ever and a day!  Then tossing both arms, with measureless
imprecations he shouted out: Aye, aye!  and I'll chase him round Good Hope,
and round the horn, and round the norway maelstrom, and round perdition's
flames before I give him up.  And this is what ye have shipped for, men!  to
chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth,
till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.  What say ye, men, will ye
splice hands on it, now?  I think ye do look brave.  Aye, aye!  shouted the
harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: A sharp eye
for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!  God bless ye, he seemed
to half sob and half shout.  God bless ye, men.  Steward!  go draw the great
measure of grog.  But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not

     chase the white whale?  art not game for Moby Dick?  I am game for his
crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes
in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my
commander's vengeance.  How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even
if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab?  it will not fetch thee much in our
Nantucket market.  Nantucket market!  Hoot!  But come closer, Starbuck; thou

     requirest a little lower layer.  If money's to be the measurer, man, and the
accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling
it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee,

     that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!  He smites his chest,
whispered Stubb, what's that for?  methinks it rings most vast, but hollow.

     Vengeance on a dumb brute!  cried Starbuck, that simply smote thee from
blindest instinct!  Madness!  To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab,
seems blasphemous.  Hark ye yet again, --the little lower layer.  All visible
objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.  But in each event --in the living
act, the undoubted deed --there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts
forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.  If man
will strike, strike through
the mask!  How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the
wall?  To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.  Sometimes I
think there's naught beyond.  But 'tis enough.  He tasks me; he heaps me; I
see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.
That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent,
or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.  Talk not
to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.  For could the
sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair
play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.  But not my master, man,
is even that fair play.  Who's over me?  Truth hath no confines.  Take off
thine eye!  more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare!  So,
so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow.  But
look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself.  There are
men from whom warm words are small indignity.  I meant not to incense thee.
Let it go.  Look!  see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn -- living,
breathing pictures painted by the sun.  The Pagan leopards --the unrecking and
unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid
life they feel!  The crew, man, the crew!  Are they not one and all with Ahab,
in this matter of the whale?  See Stubb!  he laughs!  See yonder Chilian!  he
snorts to think of it.  Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost
sapling cannot, Starbuck!  And what is it?  Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike
a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck.  What is it more?  From this one poor
hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back,

     when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone?  Ah!  constrainings seize
thee; I see!  the billow lifts thee!  Speak, but speak! --Aye, aye!  thy
silence, then, that voices thee. ( aside) something shot from my dilated
nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs.  Starbuck now is mine; cannot
oppose me now, without rebellion.  God keep me! --keep us all!  murmured
Starbuck, lowly.  But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the
mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh
from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of
the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the
masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in.  For again Starbuck's downcast
eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died
away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as
before.  Ah, ye admonitions and warnings!  why stay ye not when ye come?  But
rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows!  Yet not so much
predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within.
For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our
being, these still drive us on.  The measure!  the measure!  cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered
them to produce their weapons.  Then ranging them before him near the capstan,

     with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood at his side
with their lances, and the rest of the ship's company formed a circle round
the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew.
But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves
meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of
the bison; but, alas!  only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.

     Drink and pass!  he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest
seaman.  The crew alone now drink.  Round with it, round!  Short draughts
--long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof.  So, so; it goes round
excellently.  It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye.
well done; almost drained.  That way it went, this way it comes.  Hand it me
-- here's a hollow!  Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and
gone.  Steward, refill!  Attend now, my braves.  I have mustered ye all round
this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers,
stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may
in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me.  O men,
you will yet see that-- Ha!  boy, come back?  bad pennies come not sooner.
Hand it me.  Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer't not thou St.
Vitus' imp --away, thou ague!  Advance, ye mates!  Cross your lances full
before me.  Well
done!  Let me touch the axis.  So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the
three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing,
suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask.  It seemed as though, by some
nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same
fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.
The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect.
Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell
downright.  In vain!  cried Ahab; but, maybe, 'tis well.  For did ye three
but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had
perhaps expired from out me.  Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead.
Perchance ye need it not.  Down lances!  And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye
three cup-bearers to my three pagan kinsmen there --yon three most honorable
gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers.  Disdain the task?  What, when
the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer?  Oh, my
sweet cardinals!  your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it.  I do not
order ye; ye will it.  Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!

     Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached
iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him.

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

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

     The cabin; by the stern windows;

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

     By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning

     against it.  My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a
madman!  Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field!
But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me!  I think I see
his impious end; but feel that
I must help him to it.  Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to
him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.  Horrible old man!  Who's
over him, he cries; --aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he
lords it over all below!  Oh!  I plainly see my miserable office, --to obey,
rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity!  For in his eyes I read

     some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it.  Yet is there hope.  Time and
tide flow wide.  The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the
small gold-fish has its glassy globe.  His heaven-insulting purpose, God may
wedge aside.  I would up heart, were it not like lead.  But my whole clock's
run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
[ A burst of revelry from the forecastle.] Oh, God!  to sail with such a
heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them!  Whelped
somewhere by the sharkish sea.  The white whale is their demigorgon.  Hark!
the infernal orgies!  that revelry is forward!  mark the unfaltering silence
aft!  Methinks it pictures life.  Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on
the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where
he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the
wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings.  The long howl thrills

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

     ( Stubb solus, and

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

     ( Foresail

     rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and

     lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.) Farewell and
adieu to you, Spanish ladies!  Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!  Our
captain's commanded. -- 1st Nantucket Sailor Oh, boys, don't be sentimental;
it's bad for the digestion!  Take a tonic, follow me! ( Sings, and all

     follow.) Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A
viewing of those gallant whales That blew at every strand.  Oh, your tubs in
your boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And we'll have one of those
fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand!  So, be cheery, my lads!  may your hearts
never fail!  While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!  Mate's Voice
from the Quarter-Deck Eight bells there, forward! 2nd Nantucket Sailor
Avast the chorus!  Eight bells there!  d'ye hear, bell-boy?  Strike the bell
eight, thou Pip!  thou blackling!  and let me call the watch.  I've the sort
of mouth for that --the hogshead mouth.  So, so, ( thrusts his head down the

     scuttle,)  Star--bo--l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!  Eight bells there below!  Tumble
up!  Dutch Sailor Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that.  I mark
this in our old Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as
filliping to others.  We sing; they sleep --aye, lie down there, like
ground-tier butts.  At 'em again!  There, take this copper-pump, and hail
'em through it.  Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses.  Tell 'em it's
the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment.  That's
the way -- that's it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter.

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

     sleepy.) Don't know where it is.  French Sailor Beat thy belly, then, and
wag thy ears.  Jig it, men, I say; merry's the word; hurrah!  Damn me, won't
you dance?  Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle?
Throw yourselves!  Legs!  Legs!  Iceland Sailor I don't like your floor,
maty; it's too springy to my taste.  I'm used to ice-floors.  I'm sorry to
throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me.  Maltese Sailor Me too;
where's your girls?  Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right,
and say to himself, how d'ye do?  Partners!  I must have partners!  Sicilian
Sailor Aye; girls and a green! --then I'll hop with ye; yea, turn
grasshopper!  Long-Island Sailor Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more
of us.  Hoe corn when you may, I say.  All legs go to harvest soon.  Ah!  here

     comes the music; now for it!  Azore Sailor ( Ascending, and pitching the

     tambourine up the scuttle.)
Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount!  Now, boys!
 ( The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some

     sleep or lie among the coils of rigging.  Oaths a-plenty.) Azore
Sailor ( Dancing.) Go it, Pip!  Bang it, bell-boy!  Rig it, dig it, stig
it, quig it, bell-boy; Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!  Pip
Jinglers, you say? --there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.  China
Sailor Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.
French Sailor Merry-mad!  Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!
split jibs!  tear yourselves!  Tashtego ( Quietly smoking.) That's a white
man; he calls that fun: humph!  I save my sweat.  Old Manx Sailor I wonder
whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over.  I'll
dance over your grave, I will --that's the bitterest threat of your
night-women, that beat head-winds round corners.  O Christ!  to think of the
green navies and the green-skulled crews!  Well, well; belike the whole
world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one
ballroom of it.  Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once. 3d Nantucket
Sailor Spell oh! --whew!  this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm
--give us a whiff, Tash. ( They cease dancing, and gather in clusters.

     Meantime the sky darkens -- the wind rises.)
Lascar Sailor By Brahma!  boys, it'll be douse sail soon.  The sky-born,
high-tide Ganges turned to wind!  Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
Maltese Sailor ( Reclining and shaking his cap.) It's the waves --the
snow's caps turn to jig it now.  They'll shake their tassels soon.  Now would
all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them evermore!
There's naught so sweet on earth --heaven may not match it! --as those swift
glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide
such ripe, bursting grapes.  Sicilian Sailor ( Reclining.) Tell me not of
it!  Hark ye, lad --fleet interlacings of the limbs --lithe swayings --coyings
--flutterings!  lip!  heart!  hip!  all graze: unceasing touch and go!  not
taste, observe ye, else come satiety.  Eh, Pagan? ( Nudging.) Tahitan
Sailor ( Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!
--the Heeva-Heeva!  Ah!  low veiled, high palmed Tahiti!  I still rest me on thy
mat, but the soft soil has slid!  I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat!
green the first day i brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite.  Ah me!
--not thou nor I can bear the change!  How then, if so be transplanted to yon
sky?  Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they
leap down the crags and drown the villages? --The blast!  the blast!  Up,
spine, and meet it! ( Leaps to his feet.) Portuguese Sailor How the sea
rolls swashing 'gainst the side!  Stand by for reefing, hearties!  the winds
are just crossing swords, pell-mell they'll go lunging presently.  Danish
Sailor Crack, crack, old ship!  so long as thou crackest, thou holdest!  Well
done!  The mate there holds ye to it stiffly.  He's no more
afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with
storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes! 4th Nantucket Sailor He has
his orders, mind ye that.  I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a
squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol --fire your ship
right into it!  English Sailor Blood!  but that old man's a grand old cove!
We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!  All Aye!  aye!  Old Manx Sailor
How the three pines shake!  Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when
shifted to any other soil, and here there's none but the crew's cursed clay.
Steady, helmsman!  steady.  This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap
ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea.  Our captain has his birth-mark; look
yonder, boys, there's another in the sky --lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch
black.  Daggoo What of that?  Who's afraid of black's afraid of me!  I'm
quarried out of it!  Spanish Sailor ( Aside.) He wants to bully, ah! --the
old grudge makes me touchy. ( Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the
undeniable dark side of mankind --devilish dark at that.  No offence.  Daggoo
( grimly) None.  St.  Jago's Sailor That Spaniard's mad or drunk.  But that
can't be, or else in his one case our old Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat
long in working. 5th Nantucket Sailor What's that I saw--lightning?  Yes.
Spanish Sailor No; Daggoo showing his teeth.  Daggoo ( springing) Swallow
thine, mannikin!  White skin, white liver!  Spanish Sailor ( meeting him)
Knife thee heartily!  big frame, small spirit!  All A row!  a row!  a row!
Tashtego ( with a whiff) A row a'low, and a row aloft --Gods and men --both
brawlers!  Humph!  Belfast Sailor A row!  arrah a row!  The Virgin be blessed,
a row!  Plunge in with ye!  English Sailor Fair play!  Snatch the Spaniard's
knife!  A ring, a ring!  Old Manx Sailor Ready formed.  There!  the ringed
horizon.  In that ring Cain struck Abel.  Sweet work, right work!  No?  Why
then, God, mad'st thou the ring?  Mate's Voice from the Quarter Deck Hands by
the halyards!  in top-gallant sails!  Stand by to reef topsails!  All The
squall!  the squall!  jump, my jollies! ( They scatter.) Pip ( shrinking

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

     I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts
had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and
stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the
dread in my soul.  A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's
quenchless feud seemed mine.  With greedy ears I learned the history of that
murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of
violence and revenge.  For some time past, though at intervals only, the
unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen.  But not all of them knew of his
existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while
the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was
small indeed.  For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the
disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference,
many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so
as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter
a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each
separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all
these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed
the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special
individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick.  It was hardly to be doubted,
that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or
on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and
malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had
completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I
say, that the whale in question must have been no other than moby Dick.  Yet
as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not
unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content
to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of
the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.  In that way,
mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been
popularly regarded.  And as for those who, previously hearing of the White
Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had
every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for
any other whale of that species.  But at length, such calamities did ensue in
these assaults --not restricted to sprained wrists and ancles, broken limbs,
or devouring amputations --but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those
repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon
Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave
hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.  Nor did
wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the
true histories of these deadly encounters.  For not only do fabulous rumors
naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events, --as the
smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than
in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate
reality for them to cling to.  And as the sea surpasses the land in this
matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in
the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the
rumors which sometimes circulate there.  For not only are whalemen as a body
unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors;
but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into
contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face
they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to
them.  Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand
miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled
hearthstone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such
latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman
is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a
mighty birth.  No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere
transit over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale
did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and
half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually
invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly
appears.  So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few
who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those
hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.  But there were still
other and more vital practical influences at work.  Not even at the present
day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished
from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen

     as a body.  There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and
courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would
perhaps --either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity,
decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of
whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the
American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but
whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster
primitively pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will
hearken with a childish fire-side interest and awe, to the wild, strange
tales of
Southern whaling.  Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm
Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which
stem him.  And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former
legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists
--Olassen and Povelson --declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a
consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly
ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.  Nor even down to so
late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar impressions effaced.
For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the
Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are struck with the most lively
terrors, and often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves
against the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death.  And
however the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as
these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of
Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their
vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.  So that overawed by the rumors
and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference
to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was
oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the
perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although
other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at
such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.  That to attempt
it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity.  on this head, there

     are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.  Nevertheless, some there
were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby
Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly
and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and
without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee
from the battle if offered.  One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at
last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the
superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was
ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at
one and the same instant of time.  Nor, credulous as such minds must have been,
was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious
probability.  For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet
been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the
Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to
his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and
contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic
modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with
such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.  It is a thing well
known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed
upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been
captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs
of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas.  Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in
some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between
the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days.  Hence, by inference,
it has been believed by some whalemen, that the nor' west passage, so long a
problem to man, was never a problem to the whale.  So that here, in the real
living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the
inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a
lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still
more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters
were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage);
these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the
whaleman.  Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and
knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped
alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go
still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous,
but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves
of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed;

     or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick
blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in
unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once
more be seen.  But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was
enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to
strike the imagination with unwonted power.  For, it was not so much his
uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as
was elsewhere thrown out --a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a
high, pyramidical white hump.  These were his prominent features; the tokens
whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at
a long distance, to those who knew him.  The rest of his body was so streaked,
and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had

     gained his distinctive appellation of the white Whale; a name, indeed,
literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon
through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all
spangled with golden gleamings.  Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his
remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the
whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which,
according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his
assaults.  More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than
perhaps aught else.  For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with
every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn
around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to
splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.  Already several
fatalities had attended his chase.  But though similar disasters, however
little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most
instances, such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity,
that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as
having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.  Judge, then, to what pitches
of inflamed, distracted fury the
minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of
chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the
white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating
sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.  His three boats stove
around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain,
seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an
Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach
the fathom-deep life of the whale.  That captain was Ahab.  And then it was,
that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had
reaped away ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.  No turbaned
Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming
malice.  Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost
fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale,
all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to
identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and
spiritual exasperations.  The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac
incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in
them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.  That
intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion
even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient
Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down
and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it.  All that
most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth
with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the
subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.  He piled upon the
whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole
race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst
his hot heart's shell upon it.
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the
precise time of his bodily dismemberment.  Then, in darting at the monster,
knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal
animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but
felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.  Yet, when by this
collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks,
ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid
winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body
and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.
That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the
final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at
intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed
of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was
moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him
fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock.  In a strait-jacket,
he swung to the mad rockings of the gales.  And, when running into more
sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across
the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed
left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark
den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm,
collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and
his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in
his hidden self, raved on.  Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most
feline thing.  When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured
into some still subtler form.  Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but
deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman
flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge.  But, as in his
narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left
behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect
had perished.  That before living agent, now became the living instrument.  If
such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy
stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred
cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength,
Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever
he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.  This is much;
yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.  But vain to
popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.  Winding far down from
within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand
--however grand and wonderful, now quit it; --and take your way, ye nobler,
sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the
fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful
essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and
throned on torsoes!  So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that
captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen
brow the piled entablatures of ages.  Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder
souls!  question that proud, sad king!  A family likeness!  aye, he did beget
ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old
State-secret come.  Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely:
all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.  Yet without power to
kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did
now long dissemble; in some sort, did still.  But that thing of his
dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will
determinate.  Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that
when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him
otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the
terrible casualty which had overtaken him.  The report of his undeniable
delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause.  And so
too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of
sailing in the pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow.  Nor is
it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling
voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that
prudent isle were inclined to
harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better
qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the
bloody hunt of whales.  Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed,
unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found,
would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most
appalling of all brutes.  Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally
incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to
cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack.  But be all this as it may,
certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and
keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the
one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale.  Had any one of
his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him
then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship
from such a fiendish man!  They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit
to be counted down in dollars from the mint.  He was intent on an audacious,
immitigable, and supernatural revenge.  Here, then, was this grey-headed,
ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the
head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and
cannibals --morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue
or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference
and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask.  Such a
crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal
fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.  How it was that they so
aboundingly responded to the old man's ire --by what evil magic their souls
were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale
as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be --what the
White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in
some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of
the seas of life, --all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael
can go.  The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell
whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?  Who
does not feel the
irresistible arm drag?  What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still?
For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but
while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute
but the deadliest ill.

     What the white whale was to
Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could
not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another
thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by
its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and
well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a
comprehensible form.  It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things
appalled me.  But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some
dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be
naught.  Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances
beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised
a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings
of Pegu placing the title Lord of the White Elephants above all their other
magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling
the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag
bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian
Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color
the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the
human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky
tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been
even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked
a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this
same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things --the innocence of
brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving
of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many
climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge,
and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white
steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it
has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian
fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar;

     and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a
snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice
of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,
that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send
to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though
directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name
of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is
specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in
the Vision of St.  John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the
four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne,
and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these
accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime,

     there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which
strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

     This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible
in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.  Witness the white
bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth,
flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?  That ghastly
whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even
more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect.  So that
not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the
white-shrouded bear or shark.  Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those
clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom
sails in all imaginations?  Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's
great, unflattering laureate, Nature.
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White
Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed,
small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in
his lofty, overscorning carriage.  He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of
wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky
Mountains and the Alleghanies.  At their flaming head he westward trooped it
like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light.  The
flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him
with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have
furnished him.  A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen,
western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed.  Whether marching amid his aides
and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over
the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing

     all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with
warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he
presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of
trembling reverence and awe.  Nor can it be questioned from what stands on
legendary record of
this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so
clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which,
though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless
terror.  But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.

     What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the
eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin!  It is that
whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears.  The
Albino is as well made as other men --has no substantive deformity --and yet
this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous
than the ugliest abortion.  Why should this be so?  Nor, in quite other
aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious
agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the
terrible.  From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas
has been denominated the White Squall.  Nor, in some historic instances, has
the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary.  How wildly it
heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy
symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their
bailiff in the market-place!  Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary
experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this
hue.  It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there;
as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the
other world, as of mortal trepidation here.  And from that pallor of the dead,

     we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them.  Nor even
in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our
phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog --Yea, while these terrors
seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the
evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.  Therefore, in his other moods,
symbolize whatever grand or
gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.  But
though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for
it?  To analyse it, would seem impossible.  Can we, then, by the citation of
some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness --though for the time
either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated
to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us
the same sorcery, however modified; --can we thus hope to light upon some
chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?  Let us try.  But in a
matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no
man can follow another into these halls.  And though, doubtless, some at least
of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by
most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and
therefore may not be able to recall them now.  Why to the man of untutored
ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar
character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the
fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims,
downcast and hooded with new-fallen snow?  Or, to the unread, unsophisticated
Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a
White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?  Or what
is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which
will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so
much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those
other storied structures, its neighbors --the Byward Tower, or even the
Bloody?  And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire,
whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at
the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is
full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess?  Or why, irrespective of all
latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a
spectralness
over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of
long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet
sleepiest of sunsets?  Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely
addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central
Europe, does the tall pale man of the Hartz forests, whose changeless
pallor unrestingly glides through the green of the groves --why is this phantom
more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?  Nor is it,
altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the
stampedoes of her frantic seas: nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never
rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched
cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets);
and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a
tossed pack of cards; --it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima,
the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see.  For Lima has taken the white
veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe.  Old as
Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the
cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the
rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.  I know that, to
the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be
the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor
to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose
awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon,
especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or
universality.  What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively
elucidated by the following examples.  First: The mariner, when drawing nigh
the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts
to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his
faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from
his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness
--as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming
round him, then he feels
a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is
horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off
soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water
is under him again.  Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, Sir, it was
not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
whiteness that so stirred me?  Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the
continual sight of the snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except,
perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at
such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would
be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes.  Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to
break the fixed trance of whiteness.  Not so the sailor, beholding the
scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of
legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
views what seems a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with its lean ice
monuments and splintered crosses.  But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead
chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou
surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.  Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled
in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey --why
is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe
behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal
muskiness --why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in
phrensies of affright?  There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild
creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells

     cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former
perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of
distant oregon?  no: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the
instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world.  Though
thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the
rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the
prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.  Thus, then,
the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned
frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of
prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to
the frightened colt!  Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of
which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt,
somewhere those things must exist.  Though in many of its aspects this visible
world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.  But
not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it
appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous
--why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual
things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it

     is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.  Is it
that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought
of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?  Or is it,
that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of
color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these
reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide
landscape of snows --a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all
other earthly hues --every stately or lovely emblazoning --the sweet tinges of
sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the
butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not
actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all
deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover
nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and
consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the
great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and
if
operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and
roses, with its own blank tinge --pondering all this, the palsied universe lies
before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear
colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes
himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect
around him.  And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.  Wonder
ye then at the fiery hunt?
With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would
fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness,
separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that
brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only
arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the
creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and
hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the
Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast.  But even assuming all
this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have
that intensified terror.  As for the white shark, the white gliding
ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods,
strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped.  This
peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon
that fish.  The Romish mass for the dead begins with Requiem eternam
(eternal rest),  whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any
other funereal music.  Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of
death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French
call him Requin.  I remember the first albatross I ever saw.  It was during a

     prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas.  From my forenoon
watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the

     main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
with a hooked, Roman bill sublime.  At intervals, it arched forth its vast
archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark.  Wondrous flutterings and
throbbings shook it.  Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some
king's ghost in supernatural distress.  Through its inexpressible, strange
eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God.  As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings
so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable
warping memories of traditions and of towns.  Long I gazed at that prodigy
of plumage.  I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me

     then.  But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this.

     A goney, he replied.  Goney!  I never had heard that name before;  is it
conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! 
never!  But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for
albatross.  So that by no possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had
aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw
that bird upon our deck.  For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew
the bird to be an albatross.  Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly
burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.  I
assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly
lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a
solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have
frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic
fowl.  But how had the mystic thing been caught?  Whisper it not, and I will

     tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea.  At

     last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally
round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting it escape.

     But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in
Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and
adoring cherubim!

    !  Hist!  Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?
It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a
cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the
scuttle-butt near the taffrail.  In this manner, they passed the buckets to
fill the scuttle-butt.  Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts
of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet.
From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by
the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly
advancing keel.  It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the
cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a
Cholo, the words above.  Hist!  did you hear that noise, Cabaco?  Take the
bucket, will ye, Archy?  what noise d'ye mean?  There it is again --under the
hatches --don't you hear it --a cough--it sounded like a cough.  Cough be
damned!  Pass along that return bucket.  There again --there it is! --it sounds
like two or three sleepers turning over, now!  Caramba!  have done,
shipmate, will ye?  It's the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning
over inside of ye --nothing else.  Look to the bucket!

     Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears.  Aye, you are the chap, ain't
ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at
sea from Nantucket; you're the chap.  Grin away; we'll see what turns up.
Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet
been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too.  I
heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that
sort in the wind.  Tish!  the bucket!

     Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his
cabin after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that wild
ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a
locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish
sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table.  Then seating
himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines
and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace
additional courses over spaces that before were blank.  At intervals, he would
refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons
and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales
had been captured or seen.  While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp
suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the
ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his
wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out
lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also
tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.  But
it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of
his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts.  Almost every night they were
brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others
were substituted.  For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab
was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain
accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.  Now, to any one not
fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly
hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of
this planet.  But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides
and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's
food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting
him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost
approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or
that ground in search of his prey.  So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning
the periodicalness of the sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many
hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the
world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond
in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.
On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts
of the sperm whale.  Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to

     another, the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct -- say, rather,
secret intelligence from the Deity --mostly swim in

     veins, as they are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line
with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any
chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision.  Though, in these cases,
the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel, and
though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable,
straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to
swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein
is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from
the whale-ship's mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic
zone.  The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along
that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for.  And
hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the
widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place
and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of
a meeting.  There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle
his delirious but still methodical scheme.  But not so in the reality,
perhaps.  Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for
particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which
hunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to
be identically the same with those that were found there the preceding
season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances where the
contrary of this has proved true.  In general, the same remark, only within a
less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged
sperm whales.  So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for
example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or
Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the
pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,

     she would infallibly encounter him there.  So, too, with some other feeding
grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.  But all these seemed only
his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of
prolonged abode.  And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing
his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to
whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set
time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing
to a certainty.  That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one
technical phrase --the Season-on-the-Line.  For there and then, for several
consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in
those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a
predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac.  There it was, too, that
most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the
waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the
monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance.  But in the
cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his
brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest
all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering
it might be to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so
tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.  Now,
the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
Season-on-the-Line.  No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to
make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down
sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise
there.  Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.  Yet the
premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected
by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things.  Because, an interval
of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval
which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a
miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in
seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his
wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or
in any other waters haunted by his race.  So that Monsoons, Pampas,
Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, might
blow Moby Dick into
the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.  But
granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a
mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even
if encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his
hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of
Constantinople?  Yes.  For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his
snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable.  And have I not tallied the
whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till
long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries --tallied him,
and shall he escape?  His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost
sheep's ear!  And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till
a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of
the deck he would seek to recover his strength.  Ah, God!  what trances of
torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful
desire.  He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails
in his palms.  often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and
intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense
thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and
whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of
his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the
case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a
chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up,

     and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in
himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and
with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping
from a bed that was on fire.  Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the
unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve,
were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.  For, at such times, crazy
Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this
Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused
him to burst from it in horror again.  The latter was the eternal, living
principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from
the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer
vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity
of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.
But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it
must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies
to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of
will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed,
independent being of its own.  Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the
common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the
unbidden and unfathered birth.  Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared
out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the
time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living
light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness
in itself.  God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in
thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture
feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official
circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory,
Washington, April 16th,
.  By that circular, it appears that precisely
such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented in

     the circular.  This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees
of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of
which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally
through each of which districts are three lines; one to show the number of
days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two
others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been
seen.

     So far as what there may be of a
narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very
interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the
foregoing chapter, in its earliest part, is as important a one as will be
found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still
further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately
understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound
ignorance of the entire subject may
induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this
affair.  I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall
be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items,
practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations,
I take it --the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.  First: I
have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a
harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one
instance of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain;
when the two irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken
from the body.  In the instance where three years intervened between the
flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more
than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a
trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery
party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period
of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous

     miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart
of unknown regions.  Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on
its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with
its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.  This man and this
whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other.  I say I,
myself, have known three instances similar to this; that is in two of them I
saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with
the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish.  In the
three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first
and last, and the last time distinctly recognized a peculiar sort of huge
mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous.

     I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that.  Here are
three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard
of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no
good ground to impeach.  secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale
Fishery,
however ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several
memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been
at distant times and places popularly cognisable.  Why such a whale became
thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in
that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable
oil.  No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of the
fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a whale as
there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were
content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he would be
discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more
intimate acquaintance.  Like some poor devils ashore that happen to know an
irascible great man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the
street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a
summary thump for their presumption.  But not only did each of these famous
whales enjoy great individual celebrity --nay, you may call it an ocean-wide
renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle
stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges,
and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar.
Was it not so, O Timor Tom!  thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg,
who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was
oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay?  Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack!
thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the
Tattoo Land?  Was it not so, O Morquan!  King of Japan, whose lofty jet
they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky?

     Was it not so, O Don Miguel!  thou Chilian whale, marked like an old
tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back!  In plain prose, here are
four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or
Sylla to the classic scholar.  But this is not all.  New Zealand Tom and Don
Miguel, after at various times creating great havoc among the boats of
different
vessels, were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and
killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that
express object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett
Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that notorious
murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip.  I
do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of
one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form
establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the
White Whale, more especially the catastrophe.  For this is one of those
disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error.

     So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable
wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts,
historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a
monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and
intolerable allegory.  First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas
of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a
fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they
recur.  One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters
and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,
however transient and immediately forgotten that record.  Do you suppose that
that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the whale-line off
the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of the sea by
the sounding leviathan --do you suppose that that poor fellow's name will
appear in the newspaper obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast?
No: because the mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea.  In
fact, did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect
from New Guinea?  Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made
to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one
of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three
that had each lost a boat's crew.  For God's sake, be economical with your
lamps and candles!  not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's
blood was spilled for it.
Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an
enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when
narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness, they
have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare
upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses, when he wrote
the history of the plagues of Egypt.  But fortunately the special point I here
seek can be established upon testimony entirely independent of my own.  That
point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful,
knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in,
utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale has
done it.  First: In the year

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

     totally
lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of
this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale
hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.  Thirdly: Some
eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J--- then commanding an American
sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of
whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich
Islands.  Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be
sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional
gentlemen present.  He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could
so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a
thimbleful.  Very good; but there is more coming.  Some weeks after, the
commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso.  But he was
stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments'
confidential business with him.  that business consisted in fetching the
Commodore's craft
such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest
port to heave down and repair.  I am not superstitious, but I consider the
Commodore's interview with that whale as providential.  Was not Saul of Tarsus
converted from unbelief by a similar fright?  I tell you, the sperm whale will

     stand no nonsense.  I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little

     circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof.
Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral
Krusenstern's famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present
century.  Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter.  By the
thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were out in
the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh.  The weather was very clear and fine,
but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing.  For
some days we had very little wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a
brisk gale from the northwest sprang up.  An uncommon large whale, the body
of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the
water, but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the
ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was
impossible to prevent its striking against him.  We were thus placed in the
most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back,
raised the ship three feet at least out of the water.  The masts reeled, and
the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon
the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we
saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity.  Captain
D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel
had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily it had
escaped entirely uninjured.  now, the captain d'wolf here alluded to as
commanding the ship in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life
of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of
Dorchester near Boston.  I have the honor of being a nephew of his.  I have
particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.  He
substantiates every word.
The ship, however, was by no means a large one: a Russian craft built on the
Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in
which he sailed from home.  In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned
adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders --the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one
of ancient Dampier's old chums --I found a little matter set down so like that
just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
corroborative example, if such be needed.  Lionel, it seems, was on his way
to John Ferdinando, as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes.  In our way
thither, he says, about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about
one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a
terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could
hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare
for death.  And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it

     for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a
little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground.  The
suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of
the men were shaken out of their hammocks.  Captain Davis, who lay with his
head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!  Lionel then goes on to impute
the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by
stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do
great mischief along the spanish land.  but i should not much wonder if, in the
darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by
an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.  I might proceed
with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great
power and malice at times of the sperm whale.  In more than one instance, he
has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats back to their ships,
but to pursue the ship itself, and long withstand all the lances hurled at
him from its decks.  The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that
head; and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples
where the lines attached to
a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a
horse walks off with a cart.  Again, it is very often observed that, if the
sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so
often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to
his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his
character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and
retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes.  But I must
be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and
most significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is
the most marvellous event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the
present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions
of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon --Verily
there is nothing new under the sun.  In the sixth Christian century lived
Procopius, a Christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when
Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general.  As many know, he wrote the
history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon value.  By the best
authorities, he has always been considered a most trustworthy and
unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all
affecting the matter presently to be mentioned.  Now, in this history of his,
Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople,
a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of
Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a
period of more than fifty years.  A fact thus set down in substantial history
cannot easily be gainsaid.  Nor is there any reason it should be.  Of what
precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned.  But as he destroyed
ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am
strongly inclined to think a sperm whale.  And I will tell you why.  For a
long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the
Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it.  Even now I am certain
that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present
constitution of
things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort.  But further
investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have
been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the
Mediterranean.  I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a
Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale.  Now,
as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm
whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the
Propontis.  In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar
substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale.  But I
have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale --squid or
cuttle-fish --lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but
by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its surface.  If,
then, you properly put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit,

     you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning,
Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Roman
Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale.
The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: Every fact seemed to
warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his
operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval
between them, both of which, according to their direction,  were
calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby
combining the speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the
exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary.  His aspect was most horrible,
and such as indicated resentment and fury.  He came directly from the shoal
which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his
companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.  Again: At all
events, the whole circumstances taken together, all happening before my own
eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided,
calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which impressions I
cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my
opinion.  Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during
a black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
hospitable shore.  The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the
fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden

     rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful contemplation, 
seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought; the dismal looking wreck,
and the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly engrossed my
reflections, until day again made its appearance.  In another place --p. 45,
--he speaks of the mysterious and mortal attack of the animal.

     Though, consumed with the hot fire of his
purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate
capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal
interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by
nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways,
altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage.  Or at least
if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
influential with him.  It would be refining too much, perhaps, even
considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards
the White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all
sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to
be the hated one he hunted.  But if such an hypothesis be indeed
exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though not
so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by
no means incapable of swaying him.  To accomplish his object Ahab must use
tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to
get out of order.  He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency
in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the
complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves
intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but
stand in a sort of corporeal relation.  Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced
will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain;
still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his
captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it,
or even frustrate it.  it might be that a long interval would elapse ere the
White Whale was seen.  During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to
fall into open relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership, unless
some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon
him.  Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was
noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and
shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way
be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested
it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the
obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted
meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night
watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than
Moby Dick.  For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the
announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less
capricious and unreliable --they live in the varying outer weather, and they
inhale its fickleness --and when retained
for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life
and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary
interests and employment should intervene and hold them healthily suspended
for the final dash.  Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing.  In times of
strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are
evanescent.  The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man,
thought Ahab, is sordidness.  Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds
a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it
they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common,
daily appetites.  For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old
times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for
their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and
gaining other pious perquisites by the way.  Had they been strictly held to
their one final and romantic object --that final and romantic object, too many
would have turned from in disgust.  I will not strip these men, thought Ahab,
of all hopes of cash --aye, cash.  They may scorn cash now; but let some months
go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same
quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon
cashier Ahab.  Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more
related to Ahab personally.  Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod's
voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly
laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect
impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end
competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently
wrest from him the command.  From even the barely hinted imputation of
usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression
gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself.

     That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart
and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating
attention to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his
crew to be subjected to.  For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too
analytic to be verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still
in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's
voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself
to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit of his
profession.  be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the
three mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
reporting even a porpoise.  This vigilance was not long without reward.

     It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon;
the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over
into the lead-colored waters.  Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving
what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat.  So still
and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an
incantation of revery lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed
resolved into his own invisible self.  I was the attendant or page of
Queequeg, while busy at the mat.  As I kept passing and repassing the
filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own
hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid
his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the
water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a
dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only
broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this

     were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and
weaving away at the Fates.  There lay the fixed
threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging
vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise
interblending of other threads with its own.  This warp seemed necessity; and
here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own
destiny into these unalterable threads.  Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,
indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or
strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the
concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the
completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes
and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance
--aye, chance, free will, and necessity --no wise incompatible --all
interweavingly working together.  The straight warp of necessity, not to be
swerved from its ultimate course --its every alternating vibration, indeed,
only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given
threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of
necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus
prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last
featuring blow at events.  Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started
at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the
ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds
whence that voice dropped like a wing.  High aloft in the cross-trees was that
mad Gay-Header, Tashtego.  His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand
stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his
cries.  To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all
over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs perched as high in the
air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived
such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian's.  As he stood hovering
over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the
horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the
shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.  There she
blows!  there!  there!  there!  she blows!  she blows!

     Where-away?  On the lee-beam, about two miles off!  a school of them!
Instantly all was commotion.  The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the
same undeviating and reliable uniformity.  And thereby whalemen distinguish
this fish from other tribes of his genus.  There go flukes!  was now the cry
from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.  Quick, steward!  cried Ahab.

     Time!  time!  Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported
the exact minute to Ahab.  The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she
went gently rolling before it.  Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone
down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in
advance of our bows.  For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm
Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the
opposite quarter --this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for
there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any
way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity.  One of the men selected
for shipkeepers -- that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time
relieved the Indian at the main-mast head.  The sailors at the fore and
mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes
were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the
sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs.  Outside of the bulwarks
their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was
expectantly poised on the gunwale.  So look the long line of man-of-war's men
about to throw themselves on board an enemy's ship.  But at this critical
instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale.
With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky
phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.

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

     give way, all four boats.  Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!  Aye,
aye, sir, cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great steering
oar.  Lay back!  addressing his crew.  There! --there! --there again!  There
she blows right ahead, boys! -- lay back!  Never heed yonder yellow boys,
Archy.  Oh, I don't mind 'em, sir, said Archy; I knew it all before now.
Didn't I hear 'em in the hold?  And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it?  What say
ye, Cabaco?  They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.  Pull, pull, my fine
hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones, drawingly and
soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of
uneasiness.  Why don't you break your backbones, my boys?  What is it you
stare at?  Those chaps in yonder boat?  Tut!  They are only five more hands
come to help us --never mind from where --the more the merrier.  Pull, then, do
pull; never mind the brimstone --devils are good fellows enough.  So, so;
there you are now; that's the stroke for a thousand pounds; that's the
stroke to sweep the stakes!  Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes!
Three cheers, men --all hearts alive!  Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry --don't

     be in a hurry.  Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals?  Bite something,
you dogs!  So, so, so, then; --softly, softly!  That's it -- that's it!  long
and strong.  Give way there, give way!  The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin
rapscallions; ye are all asleep.  Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.  Pull,
will ye?  pull, can't ye?  pull, won't ye?  Why in the name of gudgeons and
ginger-cakes don't ye pull? --pull and break something!  pull, and start your
eyes out!  Here!  whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; every
mother's son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth.

     That's it --that's it.  Now ye do something; that looks like it, my
steel-bits.  Start her --start her, my silver-spoons!  Start her,
marling-spikes!  Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because

     he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially
in inculcating the religion of rowing.  But you must not suppose from this
specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with
his congregation.  Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity.
He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely
compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a
spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without
pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing.
Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly
managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped --open-mouthed at times --that
the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast,
acted like a charm upon the crew.  Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort
of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put
all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.  In obedience to a
sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across Stubb's bow; and
when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each other, Stubb
hailed the mate.  Mr. Starbuck!  larboard boat there, ahoy!  a word with ye,
sir, if ye please!  Halloa!  returned Starbuck, turning round not a single
inch as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face
set like a flint from Stubb's.  What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!

     Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong, boys! )

     in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: A sad business,
Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb,
all for the best.  Let all your crew pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my
men, spring!)
There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for.
(Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the play!  This at least is duty; duty and
profit hand in hand!  Aye, aye, I thought as much, soliloquized Stubb,
when the boats diverged, as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so.  Aye,
and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long
suspected.  They were hidden down there.  The White Whale's at the bottom of
it.  Well, well, so be it!  Can't be helped!  All right!  Give way, men!  It
ain't the White Whale to-day!  Give way!  Now the advent of these outlandish
strangers at such a critical instant as the lowering of the boats from the
deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in

     some of the ship's company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time
previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in
some small measure prepared them for the event.  It took off the extreme edge
of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way of
accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all
manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the matter from
the beginning.  For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen
creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the
enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.  Meantime, Ahab, out of
hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to windward, was still
ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew
was pulling him.  those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and
whale-bone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of
strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a
horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer.  As for Fedallah, who was
seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale,
clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while
at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one
arm, like a fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to
counterbalance any tendency to trip: Ahab was seen steadily managing his
steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him.

     All at once the out-stretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained
fixed, while the boat's five oars were seen simultaneously peaked.  Boat and
crew sat motionless on the sea.  Instantly the three spread boats in the rear
paused on their way.  The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the
blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the movement, though
from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.  Every man look out along his
oars!  cried Starbuck.  Thou, Queequeg, stand up!  Nimbly springing up on
the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood erect there, and with
intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the chase had last been
descried.  Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also
triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen
coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a
craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.  Not very far
distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still; its commander
recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of post
rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern
platform.  it is used for catching turns with the whale line.  Its top is not
more spacious than the palm of a man's hand, and standing upon such a base
as that, Flask seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to
all but her trucks.  But little King-Post was small and short, and at the
same time little King-Post was full of a large and tall ambition, so that
this loggerhead stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.  I
can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to that.
Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way,
swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders
for a pedestal.

     Good a mast-head as any, sir.  Will you mount?  That I will, and thank ye
very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet taller.  Whereupon
planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the gigantic
negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask's foot, and then
putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he
himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and
dry on his shoulders.  And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one
lifted arm furnishing him with a breast-band to lean against and steady
himself by.  At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what
wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse
and cross-running seas.  Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon
the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances.  But the sight of little
Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining
himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the
noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form.  On
his broad back, flaxen-haired flask seemed a snow-flake.  The bearer looked
nobler than the rider.  Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious
little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added
heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest.  So have I seen
Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did
not alter her tides and her seasons for that.  Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate,
betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes.  The whales might have made one of
their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that
were the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to
solace the languishing interval with his pipe.  He withdrew it from his
hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather.  He loaded it, and
rammed home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his
match across the rough sand-paper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer,

     whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly
dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat,
crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, Down, down all, and give way! --there
they are!  To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have
been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly
blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows.
The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over
intensely heated plates of iron.  Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling,

     and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming.
Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted,
seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.  All four
boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and air.
But it bade far to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass of
interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills.  Pull, pull,
my good boys, said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but intensest
concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes
darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two
unerring binnacle compasses.  He did not say much to his crew, though, nor
did his crew say anything to him.  Only the silence of the boat was at
intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with
command, now soft with entreaty.  How different the loud little King-Post.

     Sing out and say something, my hearties.  Roar and pull, my thunderbolts!
Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll
sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and
children, boys.  Lay me on --lay me on!  O Lord, Lord!  but I shall go stark,
staring mad: See!  see that white water!  And so shouting, he pulled his hat
from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it

     far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's
stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.  Look at that chap now,
philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted short pipe,
mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed after
-- He's got fits, that
Flask has.  Fits?  yes, give him fits --that's the very word -- pitch fits
into 'em.  Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive.  Pudding for supper, you know;
--merry's the word.  Pull, babes --pull, sucklings -- pull, all.  But what the
devil are you hurrying about?  Softly, softly, and steadily, my men.  Only
pull, and keep pulling; nothing more.  Crack all your backbones, and bite
your knives in two -- that's all.  Take it easy --why don't ye take it easy, I
say, and burst all your livers and lungs!  But what it was that inscrutable
Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his --these were words best omitted
here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land.  Only the
infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with
tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after
his prey.  Meanwhile, all the boats tore on.  The repeated specific allusions
of Flask to that whale, as he called the fictitious monster which he
declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its tail --these
allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that they would cause
some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the shoulder.  But
this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram
a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that they must have no organs
but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments.  It was a sight
full of quick wonder and awe!  The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the
surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like
gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the
boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper
waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound
dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to
gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its
other side; --all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and
the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory
Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen
after her screaming brood; --all this was thrilling.  Not the raw recruit,
marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle;
not the dead man's ghost encountering
the first unknown phantom in the other world; --neither of these can feel
stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time
finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm
whale.  The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and
more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung
upon the sea.  The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to
right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.  The boats were
pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to
leeward.  Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed
along; the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee oars
could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the
row-locks.  Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist;
neither ship nor boat to be seen.  Give way, men, whispered Starbuck, drawing
still further aft the sheet of his sail; there is time to kill a fish yet
before the squall comes.  There's white water again! --close to!  Spring!
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the
other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a
lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: Stand up!  and Queequeg,
harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.  Though not one of the oarsmen was then
facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes
on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew
that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing
sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter.  Meanwhile the boat was
still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like
the erected crests of enraged serpents.  That's his hump.  There, there,
give it to him!  whispered Starbuck.  A short rushing sound leaped out of the
boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg.  Then all in one welded commotion
came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on
a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a
gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an
earthquake beneath us.  The whole crew were half suffocated as they were
tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall.  Squall,
whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by
the iron, escaped.  Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed.
Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the
gunwale, tumbled back to our places.  There we sat up to our knees in the sea,

     the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the
ocean.  The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers
together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a
white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
in these jaws of death!  In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to
the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in
that storm.  Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the
shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.  The rising sea forbade
all attempts to bale out the boat.  The oars were useless as propellers,
performing now the office of life-preservers.  So, cutting the lashing of the
water-proof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the
lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg
as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope.  There, then, he sat, holding up
that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness.  There, then,
he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope
in the midst of despair.  Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold,
despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on.  The
mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom
of the boat.  Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his
ear.  We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by
the storm.  The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly
parted by
a huge, vague form.  Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at
last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not
much more than its length.  Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as
for one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip at
the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was
seen no more till it came up weltering astern.  Again we swam for it, were
dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on
board.  Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from
their fish and returned to the ship in good time.  The ship had given us up,
but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our
perishing, --an oar or a lance pole.

     There are certain queer times and occasions
in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe

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

     Yes, that's the law.  I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a
whale face foremost.  Ha, ha!  the whale would give them squint for squint,
mind that!  here then, from three impartial witnesses, i had a deliberate
statement of the entire case.  Considering, therefore, that squalls and
capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters
of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the
superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life
into the hands of him who steered the boat --oftentimes a fellow who at that
very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft
with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster to
our own particular boat was chiefly to be
imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall,

     and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great
heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly
prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was
implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I
thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will.

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

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

     for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously
cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the
line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of
sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the
pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in
exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called,
the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee against in
darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up
in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in
the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and
straightened it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much
interest and curiosity at the time.  But almost everybody supposed that this
particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the
ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to
hunt that mortal monster in person.  But such a supposition did by no means
involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that
boat.  now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane.  Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks
and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the
ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing
about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whale-boats, canoes,
blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up
the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would
not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.  But be all this as
it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their
place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them,
yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last.
Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable
tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay,
so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but
it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew.  But one
cannot sustain
an indifferent air concerning Fedallah.  He was such a creature as civilized,
domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but
dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic
communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent --those

     insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern
days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal
generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection,
and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as
real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to
what end; when though, according to genesis, the angels indeed consorted
with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins,
indulged in mundane amours.

     Days, weeks passed, and under easy
sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds;
that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called),
being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an
unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St.  Helena.  It was while gliding
through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all
the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing
seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a
silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at
the bow.  Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and
glittering god uprising from the sea.  Fedallah first descried this jet.  For
of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head,
and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day.
And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman
in a hundred would venture a lowering for them.  You may think with what
emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such
unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky.  But when,
after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights
without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly
voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining
mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the
rigging, and hailed the mortal crew.  There she blows!  Had the trump of
judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no
terror; rather pleasure.  for though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so
impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul
on board instinctively desired a lowering.  Walking the deck with quick,
side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set,

     and every stunsail spread.  The best man in the ship must take the helm.
Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the
wind.  The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling
the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like
air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic
influences were struggling in her --one to mount direct to heaven, the other
to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.  And had you watched Ahab's face
that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were
warring.  While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every
stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap.  On life and death this old

     man walked.  But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye,
like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen
that night.  Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.  This
midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo!
at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by
all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it
had never been.  And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it
but to wonder at it.  Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight,
or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or
two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be
advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for
ever alluring us on.  Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and
in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many
things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore
that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however
far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one
self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick.  For a time, there reigned, too, a

     sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were
treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn
round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.
These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous
potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all
its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days
and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that
all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of
life before our urn-like prow.  But, at last, when turning to the eastward,
the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long,
troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to
the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of
silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate
vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before
us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens.  And every
morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of
our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they
deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to
desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves.  And
heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast
tides were a conscience; and the great
mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had
bred.  Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye?  Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called
of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended
us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings
transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on
everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any
horizon.  But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of
feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet
would at times be descried.  During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab,
though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and
dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever
addressed his mates.  In tempestuous times like these, after everything above
and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await
the issue of the gale.  Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.
So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand
firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to
windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal
his very eyelashes together.  Meantime, the crew driven from the forward
part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows,
stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard
against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of
bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt.  Few or
no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in

     wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the
demoniac waves.  By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of
the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still
wordless ahab stood up to the blast.  Even when wearied nature seemed
demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock.  Never could
Starbuck forget the old man's aspect, when one night going down into the cabin
to mark how the
barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his
floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which
he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat
and coat.  On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides
and currents which have previously been spoken of.  His lantern swung from his

     tightly clenched hand.  Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back
so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that
swung from a beam in the ceiling.  Terrible old man!  thought Starbuck with a
shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.

     South-eastward from the Cape, off the
distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed
ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name.  As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty
perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to
a tyro in the far ocean fisheries --a whaler at sea, and long absent from
home.  As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
skeleton of a stranded walrus.  All down her sides, this spectral appearance
was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her
rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost.
Only her lower sails were set.  A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded
look-outs at those three mast-heads.  They seemed clad in the skins of
beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years
of cruising.  Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and
swung over a fathomless sea;

and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in
the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the
mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking
fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own
look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.  Ship
ahoy!  Have ye seen the White Whale?  But as the strange captain, leaning over
the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it
somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he
in vain strove to make himself heard without it.  Meantime his ship was still
increasing the distance between.  While in various silent ways the seamen of
the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the
first mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a
moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to
board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade.  But taking
advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing
by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound
home, he loudly hailed -- Ahoy there!  This is the Pequod, bound round the
world!  Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean!  and
this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to-----
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in
accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for
some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what
seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the
stranger's flanks.  Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must
often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the
veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.  Swim away from me, do ye?
murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.  There seemed but little in the
words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane
old man had ever before evinced.  But turning to the steersman, who thus far
had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish
her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice, -- Up helm!  Keep her off
round the world!  Round the world!  There is much in that sound to inspire
proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct?  Only
through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those
that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.  Were this world an
endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances,

     and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of
King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.  But in pursuit of those
far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that,
some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over
this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us
whelmed.
The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the
compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
course of the ship.

     The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on
board of the whaler we had spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened
storms.  But even had this not been the case, he would not after all,
perhaps, have boarded her --judging by his subsequent conduct on similar
occasions --if so it had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained
a negative answer to the question he put.  For, as it eventually turned out,
he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain,
except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought.
But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said
here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in
foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.  If two strangers
crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally desolate Salisbury
Plain in England; if
casually encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for
the life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a
moment to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and
resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine

     Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying each
other at the ends of the earth --off lone Fanning's Island, or the far away
King's Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such circumstances
these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into still closer,
more friendly and sociable contact.  And especially would this seem to be a
matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose
captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each
other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk
about.  For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters
on board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date
a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files.
And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the
latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be
destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her.  And in degree, all this
will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing each other's track on the
cruising-ground itself, even though they are equally long absent from home.
for one of them may have received a transfer of letters from some third, and
now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the people of the

     ship she now meets.  Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have
an agreeable chat.  For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of
sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a
common pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.  Nor would
difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so long as
both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English.
Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such meetings
do not very often occur, and when they do occur there is too apt to be a
sort of shyness between them; for your Englishman is rather
reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody
but himself.  Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of
metropolitan superiority over the American whalers; regarding the long, lean
Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant.
But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it
would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill
more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years.  But this is a
harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer
does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few
foibles himself.  So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the
sea, the whalers have most reason to be sociable --and they are so.  Whereas,
some merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually
cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway;
and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other's
rig.  As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go
through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of
ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and
brotherly love about it at all.  As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are
in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible.

     And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the
first hail is -- How many skulls? --the same way that whalers hail-- How many
barrels?  And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart,
for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch
of each other's villanous likenesses.  But look at the godly, honest,
unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler!  What does the
whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather?  She
has a Gam, a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never
heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only
grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about spouters and blubber-boilers,

     and such like pretty exclamations.  Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and
also all
Pirates and Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful
feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer.
Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that
profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it.  It sometimes ends in
uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows.  And besides, when a
man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his
superior altitude.  Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high
lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to
stand on.  but what is a gam?  you might wear out your index-finger running
up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word.  Dr.
Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it.

     Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees.  Certainly it
needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon.  With that
view, let me learnedly define it.  Gam.  Noun --A social meeting of two (or more)
Whale-ships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails,
they exchange visits by boats' crews: the two captains remaining, for the
time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.  There is
another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here.  All
professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale
fishery.  In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed
anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable,
sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little

     milliner's tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons.  But the whale-boat
has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all.
High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors
like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs.  And as for a tiller, the
whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a

     complete boat's crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or
harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the
occasion, and the captain, having no
place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a pine tree.
And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the whole
visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships, this standing
captain is all alive to the importance of sustaining his dignity by
maintaining his legs.  nor is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is
the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of
his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front.  He is
thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself
sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent pitch
of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of foundation is
nothing without corresponding breadth.  Merely make a spread angle of two
poles, and you cannot stand them up.  Then, again, it would never do in plain
sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this
straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by
catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire,
buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers'
pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them
there for ballast.  Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well
authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly
critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say --to seize hold of the nearest
oarsman's hair, and hold on there like grim death.

     ( As told at the Golden Inn.)

     The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much
like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more
travellers than in any other part.  It was not very long after speaking the
Goney that another
homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered.  She was manned almost
wholly by Polynesians.  In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news
of Moby Dick.  To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly
heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely
to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of
those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men.

     This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming
what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never
reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates.  For that secret part of the
story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself.  It was the private
property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it
seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secresy, but
the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it
in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest.
Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in
the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange
delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept
the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's
main-mast.  Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story
as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now
proceed to put on lasting record.  For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the
style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish

     friends, one saint's eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the
Golden Inn.  Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian,
were on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they
occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.  Some two years
prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you,
gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm
Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days'
sail westward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn.  She was somewhere to
the northward of the Line.  One morning upon handling the pumps, according to
daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than
common.  They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen.  But the
captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited
him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and
the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they
could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in
rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners
working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more
days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly
increased.  So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all
sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have
his hull hove out and repaired.  Though no small passage was before her, yet,
if the commonest chance favored, he did not at all fear that his ship would
founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being
periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily
keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her.  In truth,
well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes,

     the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port
without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal
overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked
vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.  "Lakeman!
--Buffalo!  Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?" said Don
Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.  On the eastern shore of our
Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further
of all that.  Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships,
well-nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to
far manilla; this lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet
been nurtured by all those agrarian
freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean.  For in their
interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours --Erie, and
Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan, --possess an ocean-like
expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its
rimmed varieties of races and of climes.  They contain round archipelagoes of
romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored
by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long
maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East,
dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries,
and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet
thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to
wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams;

     for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where
the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies;
those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures
whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved
capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float
alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the
steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts
as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,
for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a
midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.  Thus, gentlemen, though an
inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much
of an audacious mariner as any.  And for Radney, though in his infancy he may
have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea;

     though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your
contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social
quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn
handled Bowie-knives.  Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted
traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed,
might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of
human recognition which is the meanest slave's right; thus
treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile.  At all
events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and
Steelkilt --but, gentlemen, you shall hear.  It was not more than a day or two
at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the
Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or
more at the pumps every day.  You must know that in a settled and civilized
ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping
their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the
officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the
probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it,
on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom.  Nor in the solitary
and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether
unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even
for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably
accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them.  It is
only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters,
some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little
anxious.  Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was
found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
several of her company; especially by radney the mate.  He commanded the
upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to
the breeze.  Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as
little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own
person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can
conveniently imagine, gentlemen.  Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude
about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only on
account of his being a part owner in her.  So when they were working that
evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slily
going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually overflowed by
the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen --that
bubbling from
the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the
lee scupper-holes.  Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this
conventional world of ours --watery or otherwise; that when a person placed
in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his
superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance
he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little
heap of dust of it.  Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all
events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a
flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's
snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen,
which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne's
father.  But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn,
as malicious.  He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.  Espying the
mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the Lakeman
affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings.
 "Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of
ye, and let's have a taste.  By the Lord, it's worth bottling!  I tell ye
what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it!  he had best cut away his part
of the hull and tow it home.  The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began
the job; he's come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and
file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of 'em are now hard at work
cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose.  If old
Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter 'em.  They're
playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him.  But he's a simple old
soul, -- Rad, and a beauty too.  Boys, they say the rest of his property is
invested in looking-glasses.  I wonder if he'd give a poor devil like me the
model of his nose." "Damn your eyes!  what's that pump stopping for?" roared

     Radney, pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk.  "Thunder away at it!"

 "Aye, aye, sir," said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket.  "Lively, boys, lively,
now!"  And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed
their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was
heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's utmost energies.  Quitting
the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward all
panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes
bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow.  Now what cozening
fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in
that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it happened.
Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom
and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive
matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large.  Now, gentlemen,
sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times
but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to
be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time.  Such,
gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of
neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first
washing their faces.  But in all vessels this broom business is the
prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard.  Besides, it was
the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking
turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all,
Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs;
consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected

     with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades.  I mention
all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood
between the two men.  But there was more than this: the order about the
shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though
Radney had spat in his face.  Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will
understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully
comprehended when the mate uttered his command.  But as he sat still for a
moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye and
perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match
silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that
strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in
any already ireful being --a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by
really valiant men even when aggrieved --this nameless phantom feeling,
gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.  Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a
little broken by the bodily exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him
saying that sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would not do it.
and then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as
the customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little
or nothing all day.  To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most
domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command;
meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper's
club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.  Heated and irritated
as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for all his first nameless
feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing
in the mate; but somehow still smothering the conflagration within him,
without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the
incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously
commanding him to do his bidding.  Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating
round the windlass, steadily followed by the mate with his menacing hammer,
deliberately repeated his intention not to obey.  Seeing, however, that his
forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable
intimation with his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man;

     but it was to no purpose.  And in this way the two went once slowly round the
windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that
he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused
on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer: "Mr. Radney, I will not obey
you.  Take that hammer away, or look to yourself."  But the predestinated mate
coming still closer to him, where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the
heavy hammer within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of
insufferable maledictions.  Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch;
stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his glance,
steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back,

     told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt)
would murder him.  But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
by the gods.  Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the
lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting
blood like a whale.  Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of
the backstays leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing
their mast-heads.  They were both Canallers.  "Canallers!" cried Don Pedro,
"We have seen many whale-ships in our harbors, but never heard of your
Canallers.  Pardon: who and what are they?" "Canallers, Don, are the boatmen
belonging to our grand Erie Canal.  You must have heard of it." "Nay, Senor;

     hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, we know but
little of your vigorous North." "Aye?  Well then, Don, refill my cup.  Your
chicha's very fine; and ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our
Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story."

     For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of
the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving
villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated
fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through
the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers;
through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide
contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of
snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one
continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life.  There's your
true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where you ever find them,
next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee
of churches.  For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your
metropolitan freebooters
that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen,
most abound in holiest vicinities.  "Is that a friar passing?" said Don
Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
 "Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in Lima,"
laughed Don Sebastian.  "Proceed, Senor." "A moment!  Pardon!" cried another
of the company.  "In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to
you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not
substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison.  Oh!
do not bow and look surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast
-- Corrupt as Lima.  It but bears out your saying, too; churches more
plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open--and Corrupt as Lima.
So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist,
St.  Mark! --St.  Dominic, purge it!  Your cup!  Thanks: here I refill;  now,

     you pour out again."  Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the
Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely
wicked is he.  Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed,
flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked
Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck.  But ashore, all
this effeminacy is dashed.  The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly
sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features.  A
terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his
swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.  Once a vagabond on
his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I
thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the
prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as
stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy
one.  In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is
emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of
its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except
Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains.  Nor does it at
all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our
rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the
Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a
Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric
seas.  "I see!  I see!  " impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his
chicha upon his silvery ruffles.  "No need to travel!  The world's one Lima.  I
had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and
holy as the hills. --But the story."  I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman
shook the back-stay.  Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the
three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck.

     But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into
the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle.
Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil
ensued; while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and
down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck.  At intervals, he ran
close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart
of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment.  But
Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in
gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large
casks in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves
behind the barricade.  "come out of that, ye pirates!" roared the captain,
now menacing them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the
steward.  "Come out of that, ye cut-throats!"  Steelkilt leaped on the
barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the worst the pistols could
do; but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's)
death would be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands.
Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little
desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their
duty.  "Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?" demanded their
ringleader.
 "Turn to!  turn to! --I make no promise; --to your duty!  Do you want to sink
the ship, by knocking off at a time like this?  Turn to!" and he once more
raised a pistol.  "Sink the ship?" cried Steelkilt.  "Aye, let her sink.  Not
a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us.
What say ye, men?" turning to his comrades.  A fierce cheer was their
response.  The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping
his eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these: --"It's not
our fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was
boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to prick
the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw;
ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men?  look to those
handspikes, my hearties.  Captain, by God, look to yourself; say the word;
don't be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us decently,

     and we're your men; but we won't be flogged." "Turn to!  I make no
promises, turn to, I say!" "Look ye, now," cried the Lakeman, flinging out
his arm towards him.  "there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who
have shipped for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can
claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row;
it's not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we
won't be flogged." "Turn to!" roared the Captain.  Steelkilt glanced round
him a moment, and then said: --"I tell you what it is now, Captain, rather
than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won't lift a hand
against ye unless ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging
us, we won't do a hand's turn." "Down into the forecastle then, down with
ye, I'll keep ye there till ye're sick of it.  Down ye go." "Shall we?"
cried the ringleader to his men.  Most of them were against it; but at
length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark
den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.  As the Lakeman's bare
head was just level with the planks,
the Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the
slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly
called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock, belonging to the
companion-way.  Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered
something down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them --ten in
number --leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained
neutral.  All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward
and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which
last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking through
the bulkhead below.  But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who
still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and
clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally resounded through the
ship.  at sunrise the captain went forward, and knocking on the deck,
summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused.  Water was
then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed
after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the Captain
returned to the quarter-deck.  Twice every day for three days this was
repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a
scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly
four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to.
The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some

     fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at
discretion.  Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the
rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling
and betake himself where he belonged.  On the fifth morning three others of
the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms below that sought
to restrain them.  Only three were left.  "Better turn to, now?" said the
Captain with a heartless jeer.  "Shut us up again, will ye!" cried Steelkilt.
 "Oh!  certainly," said the Captain and the key clicked.  It was at this
point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection
of seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had
last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as
the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two
Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their
hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen
mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each end)

     run a muck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of
desperation possible, seize the ship.  For himself, he would do this, he said,
whether they joined him or not.  That was the last night he should spend in
that den.  but the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other two;

     they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for
anything in short but a surrender.  And what was more, they each insisted
upon being the first man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come.

     But to this their leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for
himself; particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the
other, in the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder
would but admit one man at a time.  And here, gentlemen, the foul play of
these miscreants must come out.  Upon hearing the frantic project of their
leader, each in his own separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem,
upon the same piece of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out,
in order to be the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to
surrender; and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct
might merit.  But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead
them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany,
mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell
into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences;
and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked
out for the Captain at midnight.  Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in
the dark for the blood, he and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for

     the forecastle.  In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand
and foot, the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his
perfidious allies, who at once claimed the
honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder.  But all these were
collared, and dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side,
were seized up into the mizen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there
they hung till morning.  "Damn ye," cried the Captain, pacing to and fro
before them, "the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!"  At sunrise he
summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled from those who had
taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a good mind to
flog them all round --thought, upon the whole, he would do so --he ought to
--justice demanded it; but for the present, considering their timely
surrender, he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly
administered in the vernacular.  "But as for you, ye carrion rogues," turning
to the three men in the rigging --"for you, I mean to mince ye up for the
try-pots;" and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs
of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their
heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.  "My wrist is
sprained with ye!" he cried, at last; "but there is still rope enough left
for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give up.  Take that gag from his mouth,

     and let us hear what he can say for himself."  For a moment the exhausted
mutineer made a tremulous motion of his cramped jaws, and then painfully
twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss, "What I say is this --and
mind it well--- if you flog me, I murder you!" "Say ye so?  then see how ye
frighten me" --and the Captain drew off with the rope to strike.  "Best not,"
hissed the Lakeman.  "But I must," --and the rope was once more drawn back for
the stroke.  Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the
Captain; who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck
rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said,"I
won't do it --let him go--cut him down: d'ye hear?"  But as the junior mates
were hurrying to execute the order,
a pale man, with a bandaged head, arrested them --Radney the chief mate.  Ever
since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the
tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
scene.  Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but
mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the captain
dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his pinioned foe.
 "You are a coward!" hissed the Lakeman.  "So I am, but take that."  The mate
was in the very act of striking, when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm.
He paused: and then pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's
threat, whatever that might have been.  The three men were then cut down,
all hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron
pumps clanged as before.  Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired
below, a clamor was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors
running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the
crew.  Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their
own instance they were put down in the ship's run for salvation.  Still, no
sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest.  On the contrary, it seemed, that
mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved to maintain the
strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship
reached port, desert her in a body.  But in order to insure the speediest end
to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing --namely, not to sing out for
whales, in case any should be discovered.  For, spite of her leak, and spite
of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her mast-heads, and
her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the
day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite
as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to
gag in death the vital jaw of the whale.  But though the Lakeman had induced
the seamen to adopt this sort of passiveness in their conduct, he kept his
own counsel (at least till all was over) concerning his own proper and
private revenge upon the man who had stung him in the ventricles
of his heart.  He was in Radney the chief mate's watch; and as if the
infatuated man sought to run more than half way to meet his doom, after the
scene at the rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain,

     upon resuming the head of his watch at night.  Upon this, and one or two
other circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.

     During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the
boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side.  In this
attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed.  There was a considerable
vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea.
Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick at the helm
would come round at two o'clock, in the morning of the third day from that in
which he had been betrayed.  At his leisure, he employed the interval in
braiding something very carefully in his watches below.  "What are you making
there?" said a shipmate.  "What do you think?  what does it look like?"
 "Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me." "Yes,
rather oddish," said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length before him;
"but I think it will answer.  Shipmate, I haven't enough twine, --have you
any?"  But there was none in the forecastle.  "Then I must get some from old
Rad;" and he rose to go aft.  "You don't mean to go a begging to him!" said
a sailor.  "Why not?  Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help
himself in the end, shipmate?" and going to the mate, he looked at him
quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock.  It was given him
--neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night an iron ball,
closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman's monkey jacket,
as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow.  Twenty-four hours
after, his trick at the silent helm --nigh to the man who was apt to doze over
the grave always ready dug to the seaman's hand --that fatal hour was then to
come; and in
the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and
stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.  But, gentlemen, a fool
saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he had planned.  Yet complete
revenge he had, and without being the avenger.  For by a mysterious fatality,
Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the
damning thing he would have done.  It was just between daybreak and sunrise of
the morning of the second day, when they were washing down the decks, that
a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once
shouted out, "There she rolls!  there she rolls!"  Jesu, what a whale!  It
was Moby Dick.  "Moby Dick!" cried Don Sebastian; "St.  Dominic!  Sir sailor,
but do whales have christenings?  Whom call you Moby Dick?" "A very white,
and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don; --but that would be too long
a story." "How?  how!" cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.  "Nay, Dons,
Dons --nay, nay!  I cannot rehearse that now.  Let me get more into the air,
Sirs." "The chicha!  the chicha!" cried Don Pedro; "our vigorous friend
looks faint; --fill up his empty glass!"  No need, gentlemen; one moment, and
I proceed. --Now, gentlemen, so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within
fifty yards of the ship --forgetful of the compact among the crew --in the
excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and
involuntarily lifted his voice for the monster, though for some little time
past it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads.  All was now
a phrensy.  "The White Whale --the White Whale!" was the cry from captain,
mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumors, were all anxious
to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance,

     and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by
a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the
blue morning sea.  Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of
these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.
The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was
his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood
up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word
of command.  Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate's got the
start; and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he
strained at his oar.  After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and,
spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow.  He was always a furious man, it
seems, in a boat.  And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's
topmost back.  Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a
blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat
struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing
mate.  That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat
righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over
into the sea, on the other flank of the whale.  He struck out through the
spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking
to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick.  But the whale rushed round in a
sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up
with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.  Meantime, at the first tap
of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the line, so as to drop
astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts.
But a sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his
knife to the line.  He cut it; and the whale was free.  But, at some
distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen
shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him.  All four boats gave chase
again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.  In good
time, the Town-Ho reached her port --a savage, solitary place --where no
civilized creature resided.  There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or
six of the foremast-men deliberately deserted among the palms; eventually, as
it turned out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the savages, and setting
sail for some other harbor.  The ship's company being reduced to but a
handful, the captain called upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious

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

     On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to
have touched at a low isle of corals.  He steered away from it; but the
savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him to
heave to, or he would run him under water.  the captain presented a pistol.
With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him
to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he
would bury him in bubbles and foam.  "What do you want of me?  cried the
captain.  "Where are you bound?  and for what are you bound?" demanded
Steelkilt; "no lies." "I am bound to Tahiti for more men." "Very good.  Let
me board you a moment --I come in peace."  With that he leaped from the canoe,
swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with the
captain.  "Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head.  Now, repeat after
me.  As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
island, and remain there six days.  If I do not, may lightnings strike me!"
 "A pretty scholar," laughed the Lakeman."Adios, Senor!" and leaping into the
sea, he swam back to his comrades.  Watching the boat till it was fairly
beached, and drawn up to the roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail
again, and in due time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination.
There, luck befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and
were providentially in want of precisely that number
of men which the sailor headed.  They embarked; and so for ever got the start
of their former captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal
retribution.  Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat
arrived, and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea.  Chartering a small native
schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all right there,
again resumed his cruisings.  Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know;
but upon the island of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea
which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale
that destroyed him.  "Are you through?" said Don Sebastian, quietly.  "I am,
Don." "Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,

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

     I shall ere long
paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form
of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own
absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be
fairly stepped upon there.  It may be worth while, therefore, previously to
advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the
present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman.  It is time to
set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all
wrong.  It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will
be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures.  For ever
since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of
temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and
coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin's, and a
helmeted head like St.  George's; ever since then has something of the same
sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of the whale,
but in many scientific presentations of him.  Now, by all odds, the most
ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to be found
in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India.  The Brahmins maintain
that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the
trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages
before any of them actually came into being.  No wonder then, that in some
sort our noble profession
of whaling should have been there shadowed forth.  The Hindoo whale referred
to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of
Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar.  But
though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail
of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong.  It looks more
like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true
whale's majestic flukes.  But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great
Christian painter's portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the

     antediluvian Hindoo.  It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda
from the sea-monster or whale.  Where did Guido get the model of such a
strange creature as that?  Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in
his own Perseus Descending, make out one whit better.  The huge corpulence
of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one
inch of water.  It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended tusked
mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors'
Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower.  Then, there are the
Prodromus whales of the old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah's whale, as depicted
in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers.  What shall be said
of these?  As for the book-binder's whale winding like a vine-stalk round the
stock of a descending anchor --as stamped and gilded on the backs and
title-pages of many books both old and new --that is a very picturesque but
purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on
antique vases.  Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call
this book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended
when the device was first introduced.  It was introduced by an old Italian
publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival of Learning;
and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins
were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan.  In the vignettes
and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with
very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau,
hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his

unexhausted brain.  In the title-page of the original edition of the

     Advancement of Learning you will find some curious whales.  But quitting all
these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of leviathan
purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know.  In old
Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from
a Dutch book of voyages, A. D.
, entitled A Whaling Voyage to
Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland,
master.  In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are
represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living
backs.  In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the
whale with perpendicular flukes.  Then again, there is an imposing quarto,
written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled

     A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending
the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.  In this book is an outline purporting to be
a Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed
on the coast of Mexico, August,
, and hoisted on deck.  I doubt not the
captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines.  To
mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied,
according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make
the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long.  Ah, my gallant
captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!  Nor are the
most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the
young and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake.  Look at that
popular work Goldsmith's Animated Nature.  In the abridged London edition of

, there are plates of an alleged whale and a narwhale.  I do not wish
to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow;

     and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in
this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any

     intelligent public of schoolboys.  Then, again, in
, Bernard Germain,
Count de Lacepede,
a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan.  All these are
not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale
(that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as
touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature.  But
the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for
the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron.  In
, he
published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a
picture of the Sperm Whale.  Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer,
you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket.  In a word,
Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash.  Of course,
he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but
whence he derived that picture, who can tell?  Perhaps he got it as his
scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his
authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing.  And what sort of
lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers
inform us.  As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over
the shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them?  They are generally
Richard III.  whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on
three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their
deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.  but these manifold
mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all.
Consider!  Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the
stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship,

     with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all
its undashed pride of hull and spars.  Though elephants have stood for their
full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for
his portrait.  The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is
only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of
him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that
element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist
him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and
undulations.  And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of
contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan;
yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's
deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him,
that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.  But it may be
fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints
may be derived touching his true form.  Not at all.  For it is one of the more
curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea
of his general shape.  Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for
candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea
of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading
personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from
any leviathan's articulated bones.  In fact, as the great Hunter says, the
mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and
padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes
it.  This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of
this book will be incidentally shown.  It is also very curiously displayed in
the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the
human hand, minus only the thumb.  This fin has four regular bone-fingers,
the index, middle, ring, and little finger.  But all these are permanently
lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial
covering.  However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us, said
humorous Stubb one day, he can never be truly said to handle us without
mittens.  For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must
needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world
which must remain unpainted to the last.  True, one portrait may hit the mark
much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable
degree of exactness.  So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what
the whale really looks like.  And the only mode in which you can derive even a
tolerable idea of his living contour, is by
going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being
eternally stove and sunk by him.  Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not
be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

    

     PICTURES OF WHALING SCENES In connexion with the monstrous pictures of
whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous
stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and
modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc.  But I
pass that matter by.  i know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm

     Whale; Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's.  In the
previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to.  Huggins's is far
better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is the best.  All Beale's
drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of
three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter.  His
frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to
excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and
life-like in its general effect.  Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross
Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved.  That
is not his fault though.  Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in
Scoresby; but they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable
impression.  He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad
deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done,
that you can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen
by his living hunters.  But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though
in some details not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling
scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed,
and taken from paintings by one Garnery.  Respectively, they represent
attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale.  In the first engraving a noble Sperm
Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from
the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the
terrific wreck of the stoven planks.  The prow of the boat is partially
unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing
in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold an
oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in
the act of leaping, as if from a precipice.  The action of the whole thing is
wonderfully good and true.  The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened
sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads
of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions
of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon
the scene.  Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this
whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so
good a one.  In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing
alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his
black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian
cliffs.  His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so
abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave
supper cooking in the great bowels below.  Sea fowls are pecking at the small
crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale
sometimes carries on his pestilent back.  And all the while the thick-lipped
leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds
in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff
caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer.  Thus, the foreground is
all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the
glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the
powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress,
with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his
spout-hole.
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not.  But my life for it he was
either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously tutored
by some experienced whaleman.  The French are the lads for painting action.
Go and gaze upon all the paintings in Europe, and where will you find such a
gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal
hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the
consecutive great battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the
Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a
charge of crowned centaurs?  Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery,
are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.  The natural aptitude of the French for
seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what
paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes.  With not one
tenth of England's experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of
that of the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the
only finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the
whale hunt.  For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen
seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such
as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of
effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a
pyramid.  Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving us
a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate
miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical
engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the
microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a
shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals.  I
mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran),
but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have
procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice
of the Peace.  In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are
two other French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes
himself h.  durand.  one of them, though not precisely
adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other
accounts.  It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French
whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the
loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the
background, both drooping together in the breezeless air.  The effect is very
fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen
under one of their few aspects of oriental repose.  The other engraving is
quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the
very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel
 (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a
boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving
chase to whales in the distance.  The harpoons and lances lie levelled for
use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a
sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands half-erect out of the water,
like a rearing horse.  From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling
whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to
windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains, seems
to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.

    
SHEET-IRON; IN STONE; IN MOUNTAINS; IN STARS On Tower-hill, as you go down
to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the
sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic
scene in which he lost his leg.  There are three whales and three boats; and
one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original
integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale.  Any time
these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and
exhibited
that stump to an incredulous world.  But the time of his justification has now
come.  His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping,
at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in
the western clearings.  But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a
stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands
ruefully contemplating his own amputation.  Throughout the Pacific, and also
in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively
sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on
Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and
other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in
their hours of ocean leisure.  Some of them have little boxes of
dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering
business.  But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with
that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything
you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy.  Long exile from Christendom and
civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed
him, i.  e.  what is called savagery.  Your true whale-hunter is as much a
savage as an Iroquois.  I myself am a savage; owning no allegiance but to the
King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.  Now,
one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is
his wonderful patience of industry.  An ancient Hawaiian war-club or
spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as
great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.  For, with but a bit
of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden
net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady
application.  As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage.
With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth,
of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
quite as workmanlike, but as close
packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield;
and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine
old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.  Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out
of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met
with in the forecastles of American whalers.  Some of them are done with much
accuracy.  At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales
hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door.  When the porter is
sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best.  But these knocking whales are
seldom remarkable as faithful essays.  On the spires of some old-fashioned
churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but
they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so
labelled with Hands off!  you cannot examine them closely enough to decide
upon their merit.  In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of
high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the
plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in
a surf of green surges.  Then, again, in mountainous countries where the
traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there
from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles
of whales defined along the undulating ridges.  But you must be a thorough
whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return
to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting
latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are
such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would
require a laborious re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which still
remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera
chronicled them.  Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to

     trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them;
as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked
in battle among the clouds.  Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round
and round
the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to
me.  And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis,
and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of
Hydrus and the Flying Fish.  With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and
fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the
topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless
tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

     Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we
fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which
the Right Whale largely feeds.  For leagues and leagues it undulated round us,

     so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden
wheat.  On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure
from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly
swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous
Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water
that escaped at the lip.  As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and
seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads;
even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and
leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.
But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
reminded one of mowers.  Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused
and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more like
lifeless masses of rock than anything else.  And as in the great hunting
countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the
plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for
bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for the
first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea.  And even when
recognised at last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to
believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all
parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.  Indeed, in
other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with the same
feelings that you do those of the shore.  For though some old naturalists have
maintained that all creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea; and
though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may very well be; yet
coming to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any fish
that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog?  The
accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative
analogy to him.  But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants
of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so
that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one
superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal
disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds
of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment's
consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and
skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may
augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will
insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can
make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these
very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea
which aboriginally belongs to it.  The first boat we read of, floated on an
ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a whole world without
leaving so much as a widow.  That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean
destroyed the wrecked ships of last year.  Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood
is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.  Wherein
differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon
the other?  Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the
feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for
ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the
live sea swallows up ships and crews.  But not only is the sea such a foe to
man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own offspring;
worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the
creatures which itself hath spawned.  Like a savage tigress that tossing in
the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales
against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks
of ships.  No mercy, no power but its own controls it.  Panting and snorting
like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean
overruns the globe.  Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded
creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously
hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.  Consider also the devilish
brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty
embellished shape of many species of sharks.  Consider, once more, the
universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other,
carrying on eternal war since the world began.  Consider all this; and then
turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the
sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in
yourself?  For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the
soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but
encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
God keep thee!  Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
That part of the sea known among whalemen as the Brazil Banks does not bear
that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows
and soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow-like appearance,

     caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes,
where the Right Whale is often chased.

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

     What was it, Sir?  said Flask.  The great live squid, which they say, few
whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.  But
Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest
as silently following.  Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general
have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse
of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
portentousness.  So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of
them have any but
the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form;  notwithstanding,
they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his only food.  For though other
species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the
act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones
below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what,
precisely, that food consists.  At times, when closely pursued, he will
disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them
thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length.  They fancy that
the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed
of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied
with teeth in order to attack and tear it.  There seems some ground to imagine
that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into
Squid.  The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising
and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two
correspond.  But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible
bulk he assigns it.  By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the
mysterious creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of
cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to
belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.

     With reference to the whaling scene shortly to
be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes
elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible
whale-line.  The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp,
slightly vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the
case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp
more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more
convenient to the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary
quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it
must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general
by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it may
give it compactness and gloss.  Of late years the Manilla rope has in the
American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for
whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far
more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all
things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp.  Hemp is
a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired
Circassian to behold.  The whale line is only two thirds of an inch in
thickness.  At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is.
By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one
hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly
equal to three tons.  In length, the common sperm whale-line measures
something over two hundred fathoms.  Towards the stern of the boat it is
spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though,
but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded sheaves,
or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the heart,
or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese.  As the least tangle
or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm,
leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in
its tub.  Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this
business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a
block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all
possible wrinkles and twists.  In the English boats two tubs are used instead
of one; the same line being continuously coiled in both tubs.  There is
some advantage in this; because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more
readily into the boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American
tub, nearly three feet in diameter and
of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks
are but one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like
critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but
not very much of a concentrated one.  When the painted canvas cover is clapped
on the american line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a
prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales.  Both ends of the line
are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming up
from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge
completely disengaged from everything.  This arrangement of the lower end is
necessary on two accounts.  First: In order to facilitate the fastening to
it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale
should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally
attached to the harpoon.  In these instances, the whale of course is shifted
like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the
first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort.  Second: This
arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the lower end
of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run
the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes
does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be
dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no
town-crier would ever find her again.  Before lowering the boat for the chase,
the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the
logger-head there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat,
resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs
against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they
alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in
the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size
of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out.  From the chocks it hangs
in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again;
and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in
the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft,
and is then
attached to the short-warp --the rope which is immediately connected with the
harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry
mystifications too tedious to detail.  Thus the whale-line folds the whole
boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost
every direction.  All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so
that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with
the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs.  Nor can any son of
mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen
intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at
any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus
circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to
quiver in him like a shaken jelly.  Yet habit --strange thing!  what cannot
habit accomplish? --Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter
repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the
half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses;
and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men
composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every
neck, as you may say.  Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to
account for those repeated whaling disasters --some few of which are casually
chronicled --of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line,
and lost.  For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat,
is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine
in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.
It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils,
because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and
the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain
self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you
escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun
himself could never pierce you out.  Again: as the profound calm which only
apparently precedes
and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;
for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and
contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder,

     and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it
silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play --

     this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of
this dangerous affair.  But why say more?  All men live enveloped in
whale-lines.  All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only
when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the
silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.  And if you be a philosopher,
though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of

     terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a
harpoon, by your side.

     If to Starbuck the apparition of
the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different
object.  When you see him 'quid, said the savage, honing his harpoon in the
bow of his hoisted boat, then you quick see him 'parm whale.  The next day
was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them,
the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a
vacant sea.  For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were
voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords
fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious
denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the
in-shore ground off Peru.  It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and
with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and
fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air.  No resolution could
withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul
went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum
will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.  Ere
forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the
main and mizen mast-heads were already drowsy.  So that at last all three of
us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there
was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman.  The waves, too, nodded
their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to
west, and the sun over all.  Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my
closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible,
gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life.  And lo!
close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling
in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of
an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror.  But lazily
undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting
his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a
warm afternoon.  But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last.  As if struck by
some enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once
started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of
the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the
accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling
brine into the air.  clear away the boats!  luff!  cried Ahab.  And obeying
his own order, he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the
spokes.  The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and
ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,
but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam,
that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that
not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers.  So seated
like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,
we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the
noiseless sails being set.  Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the
monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then
sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.  There go flukes!  was the cry,
an announcement immediately followed by Stubb's producing his match and
igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted.  After the full interval of
his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of
the smoker's boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb
counted upon the honor of the capture.  It was obvious, now, that the whale
had at length become aware of his pursuers.  All silence of cautiousness was
therefore no longer of use.  Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into
play.  And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the
assault.  Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish.  All alive to his
jeopardy, he was going head out; that part obliquely projecting from the
mad yeast which he brewed.  Start her, start her, my men!  Don't hurry
yourselves; take plenty of time --but start her; start her like
thunder-claps,  that's all, cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he
spoke.  start her, now; give 'em the long and strong stroke, tashtego.
Start her, Tash, my boy --start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool--
cucumbers is the word --easy, easy --only start her like grim death and
grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves,
boys --that's all.  Start her!  Woo-hoo!  Wa-hee!  screamed the Gay-Header in
reply, raising some old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the
strained boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading
stroke which the eager Indian gave.
But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild.  Kee-hee!
Kee-hee!  yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,
like a pacing tiger in his cage.  Ka-la!  Koo-loo!  howled Queequeg, as if
smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier's steak.  And thus with oars
and yells the keels cut the sea.  Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the
van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke
from his mouth.  Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the
welcome cry was heard -- Stand up, Tashtego! --give it to him!  The harpoon was
hurled.  Stern all!  The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something
went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists.  It was the magical
line.  An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with
it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings,
a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his
pipe.  As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just
before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both
of Stubb's hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas
sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped.  It was like holding
an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time
striving to wrest it out of your clutch.  Wet the line!  wet the line!  cried
stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat,
dashed the sea-water into it.  More turns were taken, so that the line began
holding its place.  The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark
all fins.  Stubb and Tashtego here changed places -- stem for stern --a
staggering business truly in that rocking commotion.  From the vibrating line
extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat, and from its now
being more tight than a harpstring, you would have thought the craft had two
keels -- one cleaving the water, the other the air --as the boat churned
on through both opposing elements at once.  A continual cascade played at the
bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest motion
from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft
canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea.  Thus they rushed; each man
with might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the
foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost
double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity.  Whole Atlantics and
Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale
somewhat slackened his flight.  Haul in --haul in!  cried Stubb to the
bowsman!  and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the
boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on.  Soon ranging up by
his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart
after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat
alternately sterning out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then
ranging up for another fling.  The red tide now poured from all sides of the
monster like brooks down a hill.  His tormented body rolled not in brine but
in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake.  The
slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its
reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red
men.  And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot
from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth
of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked
lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again,
by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into
the whale.  Pull up --pull up!  he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning
whale relaxed in his wrath.  Pull up! --close to!  and the boat ranged along
the fish's flank.  When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his
long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and
churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the
whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he
could hook it out.  But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of
the fish.  And now it is struck; for, starting
from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his flurry, the monster
horribly wallowed in his blood, over-wrapped himself in impenetrable, mad,
boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had
much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear
air of the day.  And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled
out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and
contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations.  At
last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees
of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping
down his motionless flanks into the sea.  His heart had burst!  He's dead,
Mr. Stubb, said Daggoo.  Yes; both pipes smoked out!  and withdrawing his
own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for
a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire
interior of the sperm whale's enormous head consists.  Though apparently the
most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him.  So that with ease
he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost
speed.  Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his
head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by
obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself
from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharp-pointed New York
pilot-boat.
Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated,
that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with
water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for
that purpose.  Your hat, however, is the most convenient.

     A word concerning an incident in the last
chapter.  According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat
pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar,
the one known as the harpooneer-oar.  Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to
strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long
dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty
feet.  But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is
expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected
to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible
rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to
keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other

muscles are strained and half started --what that is none know but those who
have tried it.  For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly
at one and the same time.  In this straining, bawling state, then, with his
back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry
-- Stand up, and give it to him!  He now has to drop and secure his oar,
turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and
with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the
whale.  No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of
fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so
many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some
of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some
sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to
many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer
that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can
you expect to find it there when most wanted!  Again, if the dart be
successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale
starts to run, the boat-header and harpooneer likewise start to running fore
and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else.  It is
then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little
craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat.  Now, I care not who
maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary.  The
headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should both dart the
harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him,
except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman.  I know that this would
sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in
various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast
majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much
the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer
that has caused them.  To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the
harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and
not from out of toil.

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

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

bulwarks.  Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual
orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a
seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until
morning.  Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was
dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working
in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was
yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship,

     all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object.  Very soon
you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod's decks, that all hands
were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged
along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes.  But by those
clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored.  Tied
by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies
with its black hull close to the vessel's, and seen through the darkness of
the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two --ship and
whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines
while the other remains standing.  If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at
least so far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with
conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement.  Such an
unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his
official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management
of affairs.  One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was
soon made strangely manifest.  Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat
intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.  A steak,

     a steak, ere I sleep!  You, Daggoo!  overboard you go, and cut me one from
his small!  Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a
general thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy
defray the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the
proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers
who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale
designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.  About
midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm
oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head,
as if that capstan were a sideboard.  Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on
whale's flesh that night.  Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications,

     thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan,
smackingly feasted on its fatness.  The few sleepers below in their bunks were
often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within
a few inches of the sleepers' hearts.  Peering over the side you could just
see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters,
and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of
the whale of the bigness of a human head.  This particular feat of the shark
seems all but miraculous.  How, at such an apparently unassailable surface,
they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the
universal problem of all things.  The mark they thus leave on the whale, may
best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a
screw.  Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight,
sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs
round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed
man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the
deck-table are
thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded
and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are
quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were
you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the
same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all
parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave
ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy
in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently
buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down,
touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially
congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or
occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or
more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a
whale-ship at sea.  If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your
decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of
conciliating the devil.  But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the
banquet that was going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the
smacking of his own epicurean lips.  Cook, cook! --where's that old Fleece?
he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to form a more
secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the
dish, as if stabbing with his lance; cook, you cook! --sail this way, cook!
the old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously routed from
his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his
galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his
knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old
Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his
step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened
iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of
command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard;
when,
with both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he
bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining
his head, so as to bring his best ear into play.  Cook, said Stubb, rapidly
lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, don't you think this steak is
rather overdone?  You've been beating this steak too much, cook; it's too
tender.  Don't I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough?
There are those sharks now over the side, don't you see they prefer it tough
and rare?  What a shindy they are kicking up!  Cook, go and talk to 'em; tell
'em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they
must keep quiet.  Blast me, if I can hear my own voice.  Away, cook, and
deliver my message.  Here, take this lantern, snatching one from his
sideboard; now then, go and preach to 'em!  Sullenly taking the offered
lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with
one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of
his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and
leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks,
while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.

     Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise
dare.  you hear?  stop dat dam smackin' ob de lip!  massa Stubb say dat you
can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor!  you must stop dat
dam racket!  Cook, here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a
sudden slap on the shoulder, -- Cook!  why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear
that way when you're preaching.  That's no way to convert sinners, Cook!

     Who dat?  Den preach to him yourself, sullenly turning to go.  No, Cook;
go on, go on.  Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters: -- Right!  exclaimed
Stubb, approvingly, coax 'em to it; try that, and Fleece continued.  Do
you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I
zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness --'top dat dam slappin' ob
de tail!  How you tink to hear, 'spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and
bitin' dare?  Cook, cried Stubb, collaring him, I wont have that swearing.

     Talk to 'em gentlemanly.  Once more the sermon proceeded.  Your
woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur,
and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint.  You is
sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for
all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned.  Now, look here,
bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale.
Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say.  Is not one
shark dood right as toder to dat whale?  And, by Gor, none on you has de right
to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else.  I know some o' you has
berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de
small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swallar wid, but to
bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge
to help demselves.  Well done, old Fleece!  cried Stubb, that's
Christianity; go on.  No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a
scrougin' and slappin' each oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear one word; no
use a-preachin' to such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare bellies is
full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get em full, dey wont
hear you den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and
can't hear not'ing at all, no more, for eber and eber.  Upon my soul, I am
about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece, and I'll away to
my supper.  Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised
his shrill voice, and cried -- Cussed fellow-critters!  Kick up de damndest
row as ever you can; fill your dam' bellies 'till dey bust --and den die.

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

     All dention, said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
desired position.  Well, said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; I
shall now go back to the subject of this steak.  In the first place, how old
are you, cook?  What dat do wid de 'teak, said the old black, testily.

     Silence!  How old are you, cook? 'Bout ninety, dey say, he gloomily
muttered.  And have you lived in this world hard upon one hundred years,
cook, and don't know yet how to cook a whale-steak?  rapidly bolting another
mouthful at the last word, so that that morsel seemed a continuation of the
question.  Where were you born, cook? 'Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat,
goin' ober de Roanoke.  Born in a ferry-boat!  That's queer, too.  But I want
to know what country you were born in, cook?  Didn't I say de Roanoke
country?  he cried, sharply.  No, you didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what
I'm coming to, cook.  You must go home and be born over again; you don't
know how to cook a whale-steak yet.  Bress my soul, if I cook noder one, he
growled, angrily, turning round to depart.  Come back, cook; --here, hand me
those tongs; --now take that bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that
steak cooked as it should be?  Take it, I say --holding the tongs towards him
-- take it, and taste it.  Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a
moment, the old negro muttered, Best cooked 'teak I eber taste; joosy,
berry joosy.  Cook, said Stubb, squaring himself once more; do you
belong to the church?  Passed one once in Cape-Down, said the old man
sullenly.  And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town,
where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his
beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook!  And yet you come here, and tell
me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?  said Stubb.  Where do you
expect to go to, cook?

     Go to bed berry soon, he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.  Avast!  heave
to!  I mean when you die, cook.  It's an awful question.  Now what's your
answer?  When dis old brack man dies, said the negro slowly, changing his
whole air and demeanor, he hisself won't go nowhere; but some bressed angel
will come and fetch him.  Fetch him?  How?  In a coach and four, as they
fetched Elijah?  And fetch him where?  Up dere, said Fleece, holding his
tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very solemnly.  So, then,
you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you are dead?
But don't you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets?  Main-top, eh?

     Didn't say dat t'all, said Fleece, again in the sulks.  You said up there,
didn't you, and now look yourself, and see where your tongs are pointing.
But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the lubber's
hole, cook; but no, no, cook, you don't get there, except you go the
regular way, round by the rigging.  It's a ticklish business, but must be
done, or else it's no go.  But none of us are in heaven yet.  Drop your
tongs, cook, and hear my orders.  Do ye hear?  Hold your hat in one hand, and
clap t'other a'top of your heart, when I'm giving my orders, cook.  What!
that your heart, there? --that's your gizzard!  Aloft!  aloft! --that's it --now
you have it.  Hold it there now, and pay attention.  All 'dention, said
the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his
grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time.

     Well then, cook; you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I
have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don't you?  Well,
for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here,
the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing.
Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that
done, dish it; d'ye hear?  And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in
the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in
pickle.  As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook.  There, now
ye may go.
But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.  Cook, give
me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch.  D'ye hear?  away you
sail, then. --Halloa!  stop!  make a bow before you go. --Avast heaving again!

     Whale-balls for breakfast --don't forget.  Wish, by gor!  whale eat him,
'stead of him eat whale.  I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan Massa
Shark hisself, muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage
ejaculation he went to his hammock.
A little item may as well be related here.  The strongest and most reliable
hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes
or tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier
than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death,
causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you
cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it.  But
this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared
with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the

     other end is secured to the ship.  By adroit management the wooden float is

     to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the made
whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the

     body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the
point of junction with its broad flukes or lobes.

     That mortal man should feed upon
the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light,
as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a
little into the history and philosophy of it.  It is upon record, that three
centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in
France, and commanded large prices there.  Also, that in Henry VIIIth's
time, a certain cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an
admirable sauce to be eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember,
are a species of whale.  Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine
eating.  The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and
being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls.

     The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them.  They had a great
porpoise grant from the crown.  The fact is, that among his hunters at least,
the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so
much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one
hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.  Only the most unprejudiced
of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of

cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious.  We all know how they
live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil.
Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for
infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing.  And this reminds me
that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by
a whaling vessel --that these men actually lived for several months on the
mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying out the
blubber.  Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called fritters; which,
indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling
something like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh.

     They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly
keep his hands off.  But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized
dish, is his exceeding richness.  He is the great prize ox of the sea, too
fat to be delicately good.  Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating
as the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid
pyramid of fat.  But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is;
like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third
month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter. 
Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other
substance, and then partaking of it.  In the long try watches of the night it
is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge
oil-pots and let them fry there awhile.  Many a good supper have I thus made.
In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.  The
casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish
lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are
then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor
somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among some epicures;
and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually
dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their
own, so as to be able to tell a calf's head from their own heads; which,
indeed, requires uncommon discrimination.  And that is the reason why
a young buck with an intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow
one of the saddest sights you can see.  The head looks a sort of reproachfully
at him, with an Et tu Brute!  expression.  It is not, perhaps, entirely
because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the
eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the

     consideration before mentioned: i.  e.  that a man should eat a newly murdered
thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light.  But no doubt the first
man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung;
and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been;
and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does.  Go to the meat-market of
a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows
of dead quadrupeds.  Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's
jaw?  Cannibals?  who is not a cannibal?  I tell you it will be more tolerable
for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a
coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in
the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who
nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy
pate-de-foie-gras.  But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he?
and that is adding insult to injury, is it?  Look at your knife-handle,
there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef,
what is that handle made of? --what but the bones of the brother of the very ox
you are eating?  And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that
fat goose?  With a feather of the same fowl.  And with what quill did the
Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally
indite his circulars?  It is only within the last month or two that that
society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.

     When in the Southern Fishery, a
captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at
night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once
to the business of cutting him in.  For that business is an exceedingly
laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set
about it.  Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm
a'lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the
reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is,
two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the
deck to see that all goes well.  But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the
Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts
of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six
hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by
morning.  In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not
so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a
procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle
them into still greater activity.  But it was not thus in the present case
with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such
sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought
the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.
nevertheless, upon stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on
deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately
suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so

     that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these
two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant
murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls,
seemingly their only vital part.  But in the foamy confusion of their mixed
and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this
brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe.  They
viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like
flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed
swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by
the gaping wound.  Nor was this all.  It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses
and ghosts of these creatures.  A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality
seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the
individual life had departed.  Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his
skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he
tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.  Queequeg no care what
god made him shark, said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and
down; wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be
one dam Ingin.
The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about
the bigness of a man's spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to
the garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly
flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower.  This weapon
is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally
honed, just like a razor.  In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to
thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.

     It was a Saturday night, and such a
Sabbath as followed!  Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all
whalemen.  The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble;
every sailor a butcher.  You would have thought we were offering up ten
thousand red oxen to the sea gods.  In the first place, the enormous cutting
tackles, among other ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally
painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift --this vast bunch of
grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head,

     the strongest point anywhere above a ship's deck.  The end of the hawser-like
rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass,
and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this
block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached.
And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates,
armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the
insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins.  This done,

     a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and
the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in
one dense crowd at the windlass.  When instantly, the entire ship careens over
on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in
frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to
the sky.  More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping
heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till
at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls
upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into
sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of
blubber.  Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an
orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is
sometimes stripped by spiralizing it.  For the strain constantly kept up by
the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water,
and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the

     scarf, simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates;
and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself,

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

     I have given no small attention to that
not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale.  I have had controversies about it
with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore.
My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.  The
question is, what and where is the skin of the whale?  Already you know what
his blubber is.  That blubber is something of the consistence of firm,
close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from
eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.  Now, however
preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's skin as being of
that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no
arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other
dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but that same blubber; and the
outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that
be but the skin?  True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may
scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat
resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible
and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only
contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle.  I have several
such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books.  It is
transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have
sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence.  At
any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles,
as you may say.  But what I am driving at here is this.  That same infinitely
thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the
whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the
skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that
the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the
skin of a new-born child.  But no more of this.  Assuming the blubber to be the
skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large
Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it
is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed
state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some
idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part
of whose mere
integument yields such a lake of liquid as that.  Reckoning ten barrels to the
ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff
of the whale's skin.  In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not
the least among the many marvels he presents.  Almost invariably it is all
over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick
array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings.  But these
marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above
mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the
body itself.  Nor is this all.  In some instances, to the quick, observant
eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground
for far other delineations.  These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call
those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is
the proper word to use in the present connexion.  By my retentive memory of
the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with
a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous
hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi.  Like those
mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.  This
allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing.  Besides all the
other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not
seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great
part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,
altogether of an irregular, random aspect.  I should say that those New
England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of
violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs --I should say, that
those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular.  It
also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile
contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large,
full-grown bulls of the species.  A word or two more concerning this matter
of the skin or blubber of the whale.  It has already been said, that it is
stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces.  Like most sea-terms,
this one is very happy and significant.  For the whale is
indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still
better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity.  It
is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to
keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides.
What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of
the north, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout?  True, other fish are found
exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are
your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators;
creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller
in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has
lungs and warm blood.  Freeze his blood, and he dies.  How wonderful is it
then --except after explanation --that this great monster, to whom corporeal
warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be
found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters!  where,
when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards,
perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found
glued in amber.  But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by
experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo
negro in summer.  It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a

     strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
virtue of interior spaciousness.  Oh, man!  admire and model thyself after the
whale!  Do thou, too, remain warm among ice.  Do thou, too, live in this world
without being of it.  Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the
Pole.  Like the great dome of St.  Peter's, and like the great whale, retain,

     O man!  in all seasons a temperature of thine own.  But how easy and how
hopeless to teach these fine things!  Of erections, how few are domed like St.
Peter's!  of creatures, how few vast as the whale!

     Haul in the chains!  Let the carcase go
astern!  The vast tackles have now done their duty.  The peeled white body of
the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it
has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk.  it is still colossal.  slowly it
floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the
insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming

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

     It should not have been omitted that
previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded.
Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon
which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves; and not without
reason.  Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a
neck; on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that
very place, is the thickest part of him.  Remember, also, that the surgeon must
operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his
subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discolored, rolling, and
oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea.  Bear in mind, too, that under these
untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that
subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the
ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all
adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical
point hard by its insertion into the skull.  Do you not marvel,
then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm
whale?  When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a
cable till the body is stripped.  That done, if it belong to a small whale it
is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of.  But, with a full grown
leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale's head embraces nearly one
third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that,
even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to
attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales The Pequod's whale being
decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship's
side --about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be
buoyed up by its native element.  And there with the strained craft steeply
leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower
mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the
waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the
giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.  When this last task was
accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to their dinner.  Silence
reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck.  An intense copper
calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its
noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.  A short space elapsed, and up into
this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin.  Taking a few turns on the
quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the
main-chains he took Stubb's long spade --still remaining there after the
whale's decapitation --and striking it into the lower part of the
half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so
stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.  It was a black
and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it
seemed the Sphynx's in the desert.  Speak, thou vast and venerable head,
muttered Ahab, which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there
lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing
that is in thee.  Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest.
that head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's
foundations.  Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and
anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with
bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was
thy most familiar home.  Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast
slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives
to lay them down.  Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their
flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to
each other, when heaven seemed false to them.  Thou saw'st the murdered mate
when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the
deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on
unharmed --while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have
borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms.  O head!  thou hast
seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one
syllable is thine!  Sail ho!  cried a triumphant voice from the
main-masthead.  Aye?  Well, now, that's cheering, cried Ahab, suddenly
erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow.

     That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man.
--Where away?  Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her
breeze to us!  Better and better, man.  Would now St.  Paul would come along
that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze!  O Nature, and O soul of
man!  how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies!  not the
smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in
mind.

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

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

     thou must either-- But that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far
ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech.  Hast thou seen the White Whale?
demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back.  Think, think of thy whale-boat,
stoven and sunk!  Beware of the horrible tail!  I tell thee again, Gabriel,
that-- But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by fiends.  Nothing was
said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which
by one of those occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it.

     Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale's head jogged about very violently, and
Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his
archangel nature seemed to warrant.  When this interlude was over, Captain
Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without
frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and
the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.  It seemed that the Jeroboam had
not long left home, when upon speaking a whale-ship, her people were
reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made.
Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain
against attacking the white whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his
gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the
Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible.  But when, some year
or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey,
the chief mate, burned with ardor to encounter him; and the captain himself
being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the
archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading
five men to man his boat.  With them he pushed off; and, after
much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last
succeeded in getting one iron fast.  Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the
main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling
forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his
divinity.  Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat's bow, and
with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations
upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo!
a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion,
temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen.  Next instant,
the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air,

     and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of
about fifty yards.  Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any
oarsman's head; but the mate for ever sank.  It is well to parenthesize here,

     that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps
almost as frequent as any.  Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is
thus annihilated; oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the
thigh-board, in which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and
accompanies the body.  But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more
instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of
violence is discernible; the man being stark dead.  The whole calamity, with
the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the ship.  Raising a
piercing shriek -- The vial!  the vial!  Gabriel called off the
terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the whale.  This terrible
event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous
disciples believed that he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of
only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have
chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed.  He became a
nameless terror to the ship.  Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put
such questions to him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring
whether he intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer.  To
which Ahab answered -- Aye.  Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to
his feet, glaring
upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger
-- Think, think of the blasphemer --dead, and down there! --beware of the
blasphemer's end!  Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew,

     Captain, I have just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for
one of thy officers, if I mistake not.  Starbuck, look over the bag.  Every
whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose
delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere
chance of encountering them in the four oceans.  Thus, most letters never
reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two
or three years or more.  Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand.  It
was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in
consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin.  Of such a letter,
Death himself might well have been the post-boy.  Can'st not read it?  cried
ahab.  give it me, man.  aye, aye it's but a dim scrawl; --what's this?  As
he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his
knife slightly split the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way,
hand it to the boat, without its coming any closer to the ship.  Meantime, Ahab
holding the letter, muttered, Mr. Har--yes, Mr. Harry--(a woman's pinny hand,
--the man's wife, I'll wager) -- Aye --Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam; --why
it's Macey, and he's dead!  Poor fellow!  poor fellow!  and from his wife,
sighed Mayhew; but let me have it.  Nay, keep it thyself, cried Gabriel to
Ahab; thou art soon going that way.  Curses throttle thee!  yelled Ahab.

     Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive it; and taking the fatal missive
from Starbuck's hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it
over towards the boat.  But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted
from rowing; the boat drifted a little towards the ship's stern; so that, as
if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand.  He
clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on
it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship.  It fell at Ahab's feet.  Then
Gabriel
shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner
the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.  As, after this
interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many
strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.

    
A TALK OVER HIM It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm
Whale's prodigious head hanging to the Pequod's side.  But we must let it
continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it.  For
the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is
to pray heaven the tackles may hold.  Now, during the past night and forenoon,

     the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional
patches of
yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species
of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
anywhere near.  And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those
inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for
them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts
without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought
alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made
that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.  Nor
was this long wanting.  Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats,
Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit.  Pulling further and further
away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at the mast-head.  But
suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white water,
and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast.
An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being
dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale.  So close did the monster
come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but
suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he
wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel.  Cut, cut!  was
the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the
point of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side.  But
having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very
rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with
all their might so as to get ahead of the ship.  For a few minutes the
struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the
tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the
contending strain threatened to take them under.  But it was only a few feet
advance they sought to gain.  And they stuck to it till they did gain it;
when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel,

     as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under
her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that
the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale
beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free
to fly.  But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his
course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after him, so
that they performed a complete circuit.  Meantime, they hauled more and more
upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered
Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle
went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm
Whale's body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking
at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains
that poured from the smitten rock.  At last his spout grew thick, and with a
frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse.  While the two
headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways
getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between
them.  I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard, said
Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
ignoble a leviathan.  Wants with it?  said Flask, coiling some spare line in
the boat's bow, did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm
Whale's head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right
Whale's on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never
afterwards capsize?  Why not?  I don't know, but I heard that gamboge
ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know all about ships' charms.
But I sometimes think he'll charm the ship to no good at last.  I don't half
like that chap, Stubb.  Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of
carved into a snake's head, Stubb?  Sink him!  I never look at him at all;
but if ever I get a chance of a dark night, and he standing hard by the
bulwarks, and no one by; look down there, Flask --pointing into the sea with
a peculiar motion of both hands -- Aye, will I!  Flask, I take that Fedallah to
be the devil in disguise.  Do you believe that cock and bull story about his
having been stowed away on board ship?  He's the devil, I say.  The reason why
you don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries
it
coiled away in his pocket, I guess.  Blast him!  now that I think of it, he's
always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots.  He sleeps in his
boots, don't he?  He hasn't got any hammock; but I've seen him lay of nights
in a coil of rigging.  No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail; he
coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the rigging.  What's the old man
have so much to do with him for?  Striking up a swap or a bargain, I
suppose.  Bargain? --about what?  Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent
after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to come round him, and

     get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that
sort, and then he'll surrender Moby Dick.  Pooh!  Stubb, you are
skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?  I don't know, Flask, but the devil
is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I tell ye.  Why, they say as how he
went a sauntering into the old flag-ship once, switching his tail about
devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at
home.  Well, he was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted.  The devil,
switching his hoofs, up and says, "I want John." "What for?" says the old
governor, "What business is that of yours," says the devil, getting mad, --"I
want to use him." "Take him," says the governor --and by the Lord, Flask, if
the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with
him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful.  But look sharp-- aint you all ready
there?  Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get the whale alongside.  I think
I remember some such story as you were telling, said Flask, when at last the
two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship, but I
can't remember where.  Three Spaniards?  Adventures of those three
bloody-minded soldadoes?  Did ye read it there, Flask?  I guess ye did?  No;

     never saw such a book; heard of it, though.  But now, tell me, Stubb, do you
suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is
now on board the Pequod?

     Am I the same man that helped kill this whale?  Doesn't the devil live for
ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead?  Did you ever see any parson a
wearing mourning for the devil?  And if the devil has a latch-key to get into
the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can crawl into a port-hole?  Tell me
that, Mr. Flask?  How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?  Do you see
that mainmast there?  pointing to the ship; well, that's the figure one;
now take all the hoops in the Pequod's hold, and string 'em along in a row
with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that wouldn't begin to be
Fedallah's age.  Nor all the coopers in creation couldn't show hoops enough to
make oughts enough.  but see here, stubb, i thought you a little boasted
just now, that you meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good
chance.  Now, if he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he
is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard --tell
me that?  Give him a good ducking, anyhow.  But he'd crawl back.  Duck
him again; and keep ducking him.  Suppose he should take it into his head to
duck you, though -- yes, and drown you --what then?  I should like to see him
try it; I'd give him such a pair of black eyes that he wouldn't dare to show
his face in the admiral's cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the
orlop there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he
sneaks so much.  Damn the devil, Flask; do you suppose I'm afraid of the
devil?  Who's afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn't catch him
and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about
kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the
devil kidnapped, he'd roast for him?  There's a governor!  Do you suppose
Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?  Do I suppose it?  You'll know it
before long, Flask.  But I am going now to keep a sharp look-out on him; and
if I see anything very suspicious going on, I'll just take him by the nape
of his neck, and say --Look here, Beelzebub, you don't do
it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I'll make a grab into his pocket
for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and
heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump --do you see; and
then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion,
he'll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his
legs.  And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?  Do with it?  Sell it for
an ox whip when we get home; -- what else?  Now, do you mean what you say,
and have been saying all along, stubb?  Mean or not mean, here we are at
the ship.  The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard
side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for
securing him.  Didn't I tell you so?  said Flask; yes, you'll soon see this
right whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti's.  In good time,
Flask's saying proved true.  As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards
the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained
her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe.  So, when on one
side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other
side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight.
Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat.  Oh, ye foolish!  throw all
these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.  In
disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the
same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm
whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the
former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck, with
all the well known black bone attached to what is called the crown-piece.
But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done.  The carcases of
both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled
a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.  Meantime, Fedallah was
calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep
wrinkles there to the
lines in his own hand.  And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee
occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed
only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab's.  As the crew toiled on, Laplandish
speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.

     Here, now, are
two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay
together our own.  Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and

     the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy.  They are the only whales
regularly hunted by man.  To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of
all the known varieties of the whale.  As the external difference between them
is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment
hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the
other, by merely stepping across the deck: --where, I should like to know,
will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?  In the
first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads.
Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical
symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly lacks.  There is
more character in the Sperm Whale's head.  As you behold it, you
involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading
dignity.  In the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the
pepper and salt color of his head at the summit, giving token of advanced age
and large experience.  In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a

     grey-headed whale.  Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads
-- namely, the two most important organs, the eye and the ear.
Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either
whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye,
which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it
to the magnitude of the head.  Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the
whale's eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly
ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern.  in a word, the position of
the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for
yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through
your ears.  You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of
vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more
behind it.  If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with
dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more
than if he were stealing upon you from behind.  In a word, you would have two
backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts):
for what is it that makes the front of a man --what, indeed, but his eyes?
Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so
planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one
picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale's eyes,
effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which
towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys;
this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent
organ imparts.  The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this
side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be
profound darkness and nothingness to him.  Man may, in effect, be said to look
out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window.
But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two
distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view.  This peculiarity of the
whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be
remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.  A curious and most
puzzling question might be started concerning
this visual matter as touching the Leviathan.  But I must be content with a
hint.  so long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is
involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever
objects are before him.  Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him,
that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance,
it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any
two things --however large or however small --at one and the same instant of
time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other.  But if you
now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of
profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to
bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your
contemporary consciousness.  How is it, then, with the whale?  True, both his
eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more
comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same
moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of
him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction?  If he can, then is it as
marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through
the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid.  Nor, strictly
investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.  It may be but an
idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary
vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four
boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales;

     I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of
volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision
must involve them.  But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye.  If
you are an entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two
heads for hours, and never discover that organ.  The ear has no external leaf
whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
wondrously minute is it.  It is lodged a little behind the eye.  With respect
to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between the sperm
whale and the
right.  While the ear of the former has an external opening, that of the
latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite
imperceptible from without.  Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the
whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder
through an ear which is smaller than a hare's?  But if his eyes were broad as
the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches
of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
hearing?  Not at all. -- Why then do you try to enlarge your mind?  Subtilize
it.  Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
over the sperm whale's head, so that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending
by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that
the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend

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

     Crossing the
deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale's head.  As in
general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a Roman
war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a
broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a
gigantic galliot-toed shoe.  Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager
likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last.  And in this same last or
shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might
very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny.  But as you come nearer
to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to your
point of view.  If you stand on its summit and look at these two f-shaped
spout-holes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass-viol, and
these
spiracles, the apertures in its sounding-board.  Then, again, if you fix your
eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass
--this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the crown, and
the Southern fishers the bonnet of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely
on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a
bird's nest in its crotch.  At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that
nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you;

     unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term crown also
bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in thinking how
this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green
crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner.  But if this
whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem.  Look
at that hanging lower lip!  what a huge sulk and pout is there!  a sulk and
pout, by carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep;
a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.  A great
pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.  The fissure is
about a foot across.  Probably the mother during an important interval was
sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape.
Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth.
Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an
Indian wigwam.  Good Lord!  is this the road that Jonah went?  The roof is
about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a
regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us
with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whale-bone, say
three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or
crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily
mentioned.  The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through
which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains
the small fish, when open-mouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding
time.  In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order,
there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some
whalemen calculate
the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings.  Though the
certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of
analogical probability.  At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far
greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.  In
old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning
these blinds.  One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous whiskers
inside of the whale's mouth; another, hogs' bristles; a third old gentleman
in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: There are about two hundred

     and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his
tongue on each side of his mouth.  As every one knows, these same hogs'
bristles, fins, whiskers, blinds, or whatever you please, furnish to
the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances.  But in this
particular, the demand has long been on the decline.  It was in Queen Anne's
time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the
fashion.  And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of
the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like
thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the
umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone.  But now forget all about
blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale's mouth,
look around you afresh.  Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically
ranged about, would you not think you were inside the great Haarlem organ,
and gazing upon its thousand pipes?  For a carpet to the organ we have a rug
of the softest Turkey --the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of
the mouth.  It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
it on deck.  This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that
amount of oil.  Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I
started with --that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
different heads.  To sum up, then; in the Right Whale's there is no great
well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower
jaw, like the Sperm Whale's.  Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those
blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue.  Again,

     the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not
be very long in following.  Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's
there?  It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the
forehead seem now faded away.  I think his broad brow to be full of a
prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death.
But mark the other head's expression.  See that amazing lower lip, pressed by
accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw.  Does
not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in
facing death?  This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm
Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather
a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of
the outer end of the lower jaw.  Sometimes these tufts impart a rather
brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.

     Ere quitting, for the nonce, the
Sperm Whale's head, I would have you, as a sensible physiologist, simply
--particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted collectedness.  I
would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself
some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may
be lodged there.  Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily
settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of
the most appalling,
but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded
history.  You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm
Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably
backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely
under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth were
entirely under your chin.  Moreover you observe that the whale has no external
nose; and that what nose he has --his spout hole --is on the top of his head;
you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one
third of his entire length from the front.  Wherefore, you must now have
perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale's head is a dead, blind wall,
without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever.
Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward
sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone;

     and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the
full cranial development.  So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one
wad.  Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise
the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the
substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy.  In some
previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the
whale, as the rind wraps an orange.  Just so with the head; but with this
difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a
boneless toughness,  inestimable by any man who has not handled it.  The
severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human
arm, impotently rebounds from it.  It is as though the forehead of the Sperm
Whale were paved with horses' hoofs.  I do not think that any sensation lurks
in it.  Bethink yourself also of another thing.  When two large, loaded
Indiamen chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do
the sailors do?  They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
contact, any merely hard substance,
like iron or wood.  No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow and cork,
enveloped in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide.  That bravely and uninjured
takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron
crowbars.  By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive
at.  But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that
as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable,
at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I
know, has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise
inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the
surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering
the unobstructed elasticity of its envelop; considering the unique interior
of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical
lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and
unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to
atmospheric distension and contraction.  If this be so, fancy the
irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and destructive
of all elements contributes.  Now, mark.  Unerringly impelling this dead,
impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there
swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately
estimated as piled wood is --by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as
the smallest insect.  So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the
specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable
braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity,
and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage
through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you
would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow.  For unless you own the whale,
you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth.  But clear Truth is a
thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the
provincials then?  What befel the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's
veil at Sais?

     Now comes the Baling of
the Case.  But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the
curious internal structure of the thing operated upon.  Regarding the Sperm
whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways
divide it into two quoins, whereof the lower is the bony structure, forming
the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones;

     its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the
whale.  At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin,

     and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were naturally
divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance.  The lower
subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by
the crossing and re-crossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough
elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent.  The upper part, known as
the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale.
And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale's
vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical
adornment of his wondrous tun.  Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always
replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so
the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily
vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure,
limpid, and odoriferous state.  Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed
in any other part of the creature.  Though in life it remains perfectly fluid,

     yet, upon
exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth
beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just
forming in water.  A large whale's case generally yields about five hundred
gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it
is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the
ticklish business of securing what you can.  I know not with what fine and
costly material the heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in superlative
richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken
pearl-colored membrane, like the line of a fine pelisse, forming the inner
surface of the Sperm Whale's case.  It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh
Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the
head; and since --as has been elsewhere set forth --the head embraces one third
of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty
feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth
of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's side.
As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close to
the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti
magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,
untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its
invaluable contents.  It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at

     last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the
enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make
quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.  Thus much being said, attend
now, I pray you, to that marvellous and --in this particular instance
--almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is
tapped.
Quoin is not a Euclidean term.  It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics.
I know not that it has been defined before.  A quoin is a solid which differs
from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one
side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides.

     Nimble as a cat, Tashtego
mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon
the overhanging main-yard-arm, to the part where it exactly projects over the

     hoisted Tun.  He has carried with him a light tackle called a whip,
consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block.
Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one
end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck.  Then,
hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till

     dexterously he lands on the summit of the head.  There --still high elevated
above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries --he seems some
Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower.  A
short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for
the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun.  In this business he proceeds

     very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the
walls to find where the gold is masoned in.  By the time this cautious search
is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been
attached to one end of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across
the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands.  These last now hoist
the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up
a very long pole.  Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward
guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the
word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like
a dairy-maid's pail of new milk.  Carefully lowered from its height, the
full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied
into a large tub.  Then re-mounting aloft, it again goes through the same
round until the deep cistern will yield no more.  Towards the end, Tashtego
has to ram his long pole harder and
harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the
pole have gone down.  Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time
in this way; several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all
at once a queer accident happened.  Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild
Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed
hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place
where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself
would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons; how it
was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth
or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up --my God!  poor Tashtego --like the twin
reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into
this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went
clean out of sight!  Man overboard!  cried Daggoo, who amid the general
consternation first came to his senses.  Swing the bucket this way!  and
putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold
on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head,
almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom.  Meantime,
there was a terrible tumult.  Looking over the side, they saw the before
lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if
that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor
Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which
he had sunk.  At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was
clearing the whip --which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles --a
sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one of
the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast
vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and
shook as if smitten by an iceberg.  The one remaining hook, upon which the
entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of giving
way; an event still more likely from the violent motions of the head.  Come
down, come down!  yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but
with one hand holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should
drop, he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul
line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the
buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.  In heaven's name,
man, cried Stubb, are you ramming home a cartridge there? --Avast!  How
will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head?  Avast,

     will ye!  Stand clear of the tackle!  cried a voice like the bursting of a
rocket.  Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass
dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the
suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper;

     and all caught their breath, as half swinging --now over the sailors' heads,
and now over the water --Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly
beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive
Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea!  But hardly had
the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword in
its hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks.  The
next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the
rescue.  One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye counted every
ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the
diver could be seen.  Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed
a little off from the ship.  Ha!  ha!  cried Daggoo, all at once, from his
now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side,
we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as
an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.  both!  both! --it is both!
--cried daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen
boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair
of the Indian.  Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to
the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very
brisk.
Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished?  Why, diving after the
slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges
near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his
sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out our

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

     To scan the lines of his face, or feel
the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this is a thing which no
Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken.  Such an enterprise would

     seem almost as hopeful as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the
Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the
Dome of the Pantheon.  Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only
treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of
horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the
modifications of expression discernible therein.  Nor have Gall and his
disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological
characteristics of other beings than man.  Therefore, though I am but ill
qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the
whale, I will do my endeavor.  I try all things; I achieve what I can.
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature.  He has
no proper nose.  And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the
features; and since it perhaps
most modifies and finally controls their combined expression; hence it would
seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely
affect the countenance of the whale.  For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to
the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping
without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose.  Dash the nose from
Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder!  Nevertheless, Leviathan
is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the
same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no
blemish at all.  Nay, it is an added grandeur.  A nose to the whale would have

     been impertinent.  As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast
head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by
the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled.  A pestilent conceit, which
so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal
beadle on his throne.  In some particulars, perhaps, the most imposing
physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front
of his head.  This aspect is sublime.  In thought a fine human brow is like the
east when troubled with the morning.  in the repose of the pasture, the
curled brow of the bull has a touch of the grand in it.  Pushing heavy cannon
up mountain defiles, the elephant's brow is majestic.  Human or animal, the
mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to
their decrees.  It signifies God: done this day by my hand.  But in most
creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of
alpine land lying along the snow line.  Few are the foreheads which like
Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes
themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them
in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending
there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer.
But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent
in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front
view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers
more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.  For you see
no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes,
ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad
firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom
of boats, and ships, and men.  Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow
diminish; though that way viewed, its grandeur does not domineer upon you
so.  In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic
depression in the forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's mark of
genius.  But how?  Genius in the Sperm Whale?  Has the Sperm Whale ever
written a book, spoken a speech?  No, his great genius is declared in his
doing nothing particular to prove it.  It is moreover declared in his
pyramidical silence.  And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been
known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their
child-magian thoughts.  they deified the crocodile of the nile, because the
crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or as least it
is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion.  If hereafter any
highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the
merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now
egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's
high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.  Champollion deciphered the
wrinkled granite hieroglyphics.  But there is no Champollion to decipher the
Egypt of every man's and every being's face.  Physiognomy, like every other
human science, is but a passing fable.  If then, Sir William Jones, who
read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face, in its
profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read
the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow?  I but put that brow before you.
Read if it you can.

     If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a
Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it
is impossible to square.  In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at
least twenty feet in length.  Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of
this skull is as the side view of a moderately inclined plane resting
throughout on a level base.  But in life --as we have elsewhere seen --this
inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous
superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm.  At the high end the skull forms a
crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this
crater -- in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many
in depth --reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain.  The brain is at
least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away
behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified
fortifications of Quebec.  So like a choice casket is it secreted in him,
that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale
has any other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the
cubic-yards of his sperm magazine.  Lying in strange folds, courses, and
convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea
of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his
intelligence.  It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this
Leviathan, in the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion.  As
for his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any.
The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common
world.  If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be
struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation,
and from the same point of view.  Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled
down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would
involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one
part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say --This man had no
self-esteem, and no veneration.  And by those negations, considered along with
the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to
yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the
most exalted potency is.  But if from the comparative dimensions of the
whale's proper brain, you deem it incapable of being adequately charted,
then I have another idea for you.  If you attentively regard almost any
quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae
to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance
to the skull proper.  It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are
absolutely undeveloped skulls.  But the curious external resemblance, I take
it the Germans were not the first men to perceive.  A foreign friend once
pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the
vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked
prow of his canoe.  Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an
important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum
through the spinal canal.  For I believe that much of a man's character will be
found betokened in his backbone.  I would rather feel your spine than your
skull, whoever you are.  A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and
noble soul.  I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that
flag which I fling half out to the world.  Apply this spinal branch of
phrenology to the Sperm Whale.  His cranial cavity is continuous with the first
neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will
measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a triangular
figure with the base downwards.  As it passes through the remaining vertebrae
the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of large
capacity.  Now, of course, this
canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance -- the spinal
cord --as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain.  And what is
still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's cavity, the spinal
cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain.
Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map
out the whale's spine phrenologically?  For, viewed in this light, the
wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated
by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord.  But leaving this
hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would merely assume the
spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the sperm whale's hump.  This
august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the larger vertebrae, and
is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it.  From its relative
situation then, I should call this high hump the organ of firmness or
indomitableness in the Sperm Whale.  And that the great monster is
indomitable, you will yet have reason to know.

     The predestinated day
arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of
Bremen.  At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide intervals of
latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in the
Pacific.  For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her
respects.  While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and
dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing
in the bows instead of the stern.

     What has he in his hand there?  cried Starbuck, pointing to something
wavingly held by the German.  Impossible! --a lamp-feeder!  Not that, said
Stubb, no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's coming off to make
us our coffee, is the Yarman; don't you see that big tin can there alongside
of him? --that's his boiling water.  Oh!  he's all right, is the Yarman.  Go
along with you, cried Flask, it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can.  He's out
of oil, and has come a-begging.  However curious it may seem for an oil-ship
to be borrowing oil on the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly
contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes
such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer
did indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.  As he mounted the
deck, ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding what he had in his
hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his complete
ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the conversation to his
lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into
his hammock at night in profound darkness --his last drop of Bremen oil being
gone, and not a single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency;
concluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is
technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the
name of Jungfrau or the Virgin.  His necessities supplied, Derick departed;
but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously

     raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was
Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he
slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.  Now, the
game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats that soon
followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's keels.  There were
eight whales, an average pod.  Aware of their danger, they were going all
abreast with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as
closely as so many spans of horses in harness.  They left a
great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon
the sea.  Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a
huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted
with the jaundice, or some other infirmity.  Whether this whale belonged to
the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such
venerable leviathans to be at all social.  Nevertheless, he stuck to their
wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the
white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell
formed when two hostile currents meet.  His spout was short, slow, and
laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in
torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which
seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters
behind him to upbubble.  Who's got some paregoric?  said Stubb, he has the
stomach-ache, I'm afraid.  Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache!

     Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys.  It's the first foul
wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so
before?  it must be, he's lost his tiller.  As an overladen Indiaman bearing
down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened horses, careens,
buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this old whale heave his aged
bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose
the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin.
Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were
hard to say.  Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that
wounded arm, cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.  Mind
he don't sling thee with it, cried Starbuck.  Give way, or the German will
have him.  With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this
one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going
with such great velocity, moreover,
as almost to defy pursuit for the time.  At this juncture, the Pequod's keel
had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the great start he
had had, Derick's boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by
his foreign rivals.  The only thing they feared, was, that from being already
so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they could
completely overtake and pass him.  as for derick, he seemed quite confident
that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook
his lamp-feeder at the other boats.  The ungracious and ungrateful dog!
cried Starbuck; he mocks and dares me with the very poor-box I filled for
him not five minutes ago! --then in his old intense whisper -- give way,
greyhounds!  Dog to it!  I tell ye what it is, men --cried Stubb to his crew
-- It's against my religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villanous
Yarman --Pull--won't ye?  Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye?  Do ye love
brandy?  A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man.  Come, why don't some of
ye burst a blood-vessel?  Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard --we
don't budge an inch --we're becalmed.  Halloo, here's grass growing in the
boat's bottom --and by the Lord, the mast there's budding.  This won't do,
boys.  Look at that Yarman!  The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit
fire or not?  Oh!  see the suds he makes!  cried Flask, dancing up and down
-- What a hump --Oh, do pile on the beef --lays like a log!  Oh!  my lads, do
spring --slap-jacks and quohogs for supper, you know, my lads --baked clams and
muffins --oh, do, do spring --he's a hundred barreler --don't lose him now
--don't oh, don't! -- see that Yarman --Oh!  won't ye pull for your duff, my
lads --such a sog!  such a sogger!  Don't ye love sperm?  There goes three
thousand dollars, men! --a bank! --a whole bank!  The bank of England! --Oh, do,

     do, do! --What's that Yarman about now?  At this moment Derick was in the act
of pitching his lamp-feeder at the advancing boats, and also his oil-can;
perhaps with the double view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same
time economically accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the
backward toss.  The unmannerly Dutch dogger!  cried Stubb.  Pull now,
men, like fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils.  What
d'ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty
pieces for the honor of old Gay-head?  What d'ye say?  I say, pull like
god-dam, --cried the Indian.  Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of
the German, the Pequod's three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and,
so disposed, momentarily neared him.  In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude
of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up
proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of,

     There she slides, now!  Hurrah for the white-ash breeze!  Down with the
Yarman!  Sail over him!  But so decided an original start had Derick had,
that spite of all their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this
race, had not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught
the blade of his midship oarsman.  While this clumsy lubber was striving to
free his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to
capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage; --that was a
good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask.  With a shout, they took a mortal
start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter.  An instant
more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's immediate wake,
while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made.

     It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight.  The whale was now
going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented
jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright.  Now to this
hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every
billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled
towards the sky his one beating fin.  So have I seen a bird with clipped wing,

     making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the
piratical hawks.  But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make
known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained
up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration
through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably
pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent
tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.  Seeing now
that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's boats the advantage,
and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what to
him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would
for ever escape.  But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke,
than all three tigers --Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo -- instinctively sprang to
their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their
barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three
Nantucket irons entered the whale.  Blinding vapors of foam and white-fire!
The three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped the
German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer
were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels.  Don't be
afraid, my butter-boxes, cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as
he shot by; ye'll be picked up presently --all right --I saw some sharks
astern --St. Bernard's dogs, you know --relieve distressed travellers.
Hurrah!  this is the way to sail now.  Every keel a sun-beam!  Hurrah! --Here
we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar!  This puts me in
mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain --makes the
wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way; and there's danger of
being pitched out too, when you strike a hill.  Hurrah!  this is the way a
fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones --all a rush down an endless
inclined plane!  Hurrah!  this whale carries the everlasting mail!  But the
monster's run was a brief one.  Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded.

     With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a
force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the
harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using
all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope
to hold on; till at last --owing to the perpendicular strain from the
lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the three
ropes went straight down into the blue --the gunwales of the bows were almost
even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air.  And the
whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude,
fearful of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish.
But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this

     holding on, as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live
flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon
rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes.  Yet not to speak of the
peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the
best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken
whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted.  Because, owing to the
enormous surface of him --in a full grown sperm whale something less than

square feet --the pressure of the water is immense.  We all know what an
astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here,
above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on
his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean!  It must at least equal the
weight of fifty atmospheres.  One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of
twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on
board.  As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort,
nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what
landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the
utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!  Not eight
inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.  Seems it credible
that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big
weight to an eight day clock.  Suspended?  and to what?  To three bits of
board.  Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said -- Canst
thou fill his skin with barbed irons?  or his head with fish-spears?  The
sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the
habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee;
darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!  This
the creature?  this he?  Oh!  that unfulfilments
should follow the prophets.  For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his
tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him
from the Pequod's fish-spears!  In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the
shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been
long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army.  Who can tell how
appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over
his head!  Stand by, men; he stirs, cried Starbuck, as the three lines
suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman
felt them in his seat.  The next moment, relieved in a great part from the
downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a
small ice-field will, when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it
into the sea.  Haul in!  Haul in!  cried Starbuck again; he's rising.  The
lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth could have
been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the
boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship's lengths of the
hunters.  His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion.  In most land
animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins,
whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off
in certain directions.  Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it
is, to have an entire nonvalvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that
when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once
begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by the
extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his
life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams.  Yet so vast is the
quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains,

     that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even
as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of
far-off and undiscernible hills.  Even now, when the boats pulled upon this
whale, and perilously drew over his swaying
flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady
jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the
natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending
its affrighted moisture into the air.  From this last vent no blood yet came,
because no vital part of him had thus far been struck.  His life, as they
significantly call it, was untouched.  As the boats now more closely
surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is
ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed.  His eyes, or rather the places
where his eyes had been, were beheld.  As strange misgrown masses gather in
the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which
the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly
pitiable to see.  but pity there was none.  For all his old age, and his one
arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to
light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate
the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely
discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.

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

     and the ship seemed on the point of going over.  Hold on, hold on, won't
ye?  cried Stubb to the body, don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink!
By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it.  No use prying there;
avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a
pen-knife, and cut the big chains.  Knife?  Aye, aye, cried Queequeg, and
seizing the carpenter's heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and
steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains.  But a few strokes,

     full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest.
With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the
carcase sank.  Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed
Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
accounted for it.  Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy,
with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface.  If the only
whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their
pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you
might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon
specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of
buoyant matter in him.  But it is not so.  For young whales, in the highest
health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm
flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these
brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.  Be it said, however, that the Sperm
Whale is far less liable to this accident than any other species.  Where one
of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do.  This difference in the
species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of
bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more
than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free.  But there
are instances where,
after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again rises,
more buoyant than in life.  But the reason of this is obvious.  Gases are
generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of
animal balloon.  A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then.  In
the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right

     Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of
rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it
when it shall have ascended again.  It was not long after the sinking of the
body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the
Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was
that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales,
because of its incredible power of swimming.  Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's
spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is
often mistaken for it.  And consequently Derick and all his host were now in
valiant chase of this unnearable brute.  The Virgin crowding all sail, made
after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward,
still in bold, hopeful chase.  Oh!  many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the
Dericks, my friend.

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

     to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself.  In
fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will
fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name;
who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the
palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him
remained.  Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the
tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket
should be enrolled in the most noble order of St.  George.  And therefore, let
not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say,
have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye
a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred
trowsers we are much better entitled to st.  george's decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained
dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique
Crockett and Kit Carson --that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was
swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a
whaleman of him, that might be mooted.  It nowhere appears that he ever
actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside.  Nevertheless,
he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught
him, if he did not the whale.  I claim him for one of our clan.  But, by the
best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale
is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah
and the whale; and vice versa; certainly they are very similar.  If I claim
the demigod then, why not the prophet?
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of
our order.  Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of
old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the
great gods themselves.  That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed
from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons
in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our
Lord; --Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for
ever set apart and sanctified the whale.  When Brahma, or the God of Gods,
saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its
periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work;

     but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been
indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore
must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young
architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo
became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost
depths, rescued the sacred volumes.  Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then?
even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?  Perseus, St.  George,
Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo!  there's a member-roll for you!  What club but
the whaleman's can head off like that?

     Reference was made to
the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter.  Now
some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the
whale.  But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing
out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of
Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin;
and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one
whit the less facts, for all that.  One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason
for questioning the Hebrew story was this: --He had one of those quaint
old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of
which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head --a peculiarity
only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and
the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying,

     A penny roll would choke him; his swallow is so very small.  But, to this,

     Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready.  It is not necessary, hints the
Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as
temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth.  And this seems reasonable
enough in the good Bishop.  For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would
accommodate a couple of whist tables, and comfortably seat all the players.
Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on
second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.  Another reason which
Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of faith in this matter
of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body
and the whale's gastric juices.  But this objection likewise falls to the
ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge
in the floating body of a dead whale -- even as the French soldiers in the
Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.
Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when
Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his
escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head;

     and, I would add, possibly called The Whale, as some craft are nowadays
christened the Shark, the Gull, the Eagle.  Nor have there been wanting
learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of
Jonah merely meant a life-preserver --an inflated bag of wind --which the
endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom.  Poor
Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round.  But he had still another
reason for his want of faith.  It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was
swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was
vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the
Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from the nearest point
of the Mediterranean coast.  How is that?  But was there no other way for the
whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh?  Yes.  He
might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope.  But not to
speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and
another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would
involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to
speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for
any whale to swim in.  Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of
Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that
great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make
modern history a liar.  But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only
evinced his foolish pride of reason --a thing still more reprehensible in
him, seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from
the sun and the sea.  I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and
abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy.  For by a
Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via
the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general
miracle.  And so it was.  Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks
devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.  And some three centuries
ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages, speaks of a Turkish
Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which mosque was a miraculous lamp that
burnt without any oil.

     To make them run easily and swiftly,
the axles of carriages are anointed; and for much the same purpose, some
whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the
bottom.  Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it
may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water
are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
make the boat slide bravely.  Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his
boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared,
took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom,
where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though
diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's bald keel.  He
seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment.  Nor did
it remain unwarranted by the event.  Towards noon whales were raised; but so
soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift
precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.
Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost.  By great exertion,
Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale,
without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added
fleetness.  Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or
later inevitably extract it.  It became imperative to lance the flying whale,

     or be content to lose him.  But to haul the boat up to his flank was
impossible, he swam so fast and furious.  What then remained?  Of all the
wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless
subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed
that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling.  Small sword, or broad
sword, in all its
exercises boasts nothing like it.  It is only indispensable with an inveterate
running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which
the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat,
under extreme headway.  Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten
or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the
harpoon, and also of a lighter material--pine.  It is furnished with a small
rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to
the hand after darting.  But before going further, it is important to mention
here, that though the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the
lance, yet it is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently
successful, on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the
harpoon as compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks.
As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any
pitchpoling comes into play.  Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous,
deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially
qualified to excel in pitchpoling.  Look at him; he stands upright in the
tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is
forty feet ahead.  Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice
along its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers
up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his
grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed.  Then holding the lance full before
his waistband's middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with
it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the
point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in
the air.  He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his
chin.  Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the
bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the
whale.  Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.  That drove the
spigot out of him!  cries Stubb. 'Tis July's immortal Fourth; all fountains
must run wine to-day!  Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio,
or unspeakable
old Monongahela!  Then, Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet,
and we'd drink round it!  Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch
in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff
the living stuff!  Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart
is repeated, the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in
skilful leash.  The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is
slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely
watches the monster die.

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

breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again
to make good his regular allowance of air.  And not till those seventy breaths
are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full term below.  Remark,
however, that in different individuals these rates are different; but in any
one they are alike.  Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his
spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
descending for good?  How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase.  For not by
hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand
fathoms beneath the sunlight.  Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the
great necessities that strike the victory to thee!  In man, breathing is
incessantly going on --one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so
that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping,
breathe he must, or die he will.  But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one
seventh or Sunday of his time.  It has been said that the whale only breathes
through his spout-hole; if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are
mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his
sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at
all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged
with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling.
But owing to the mystery of the spout --whether it be water or whether it be
vapor --no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head.  Sure it
is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories.  But what
does he want of them?  No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.
Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal,

     and as that long canal --like the grand Erie Canal --is furnished with a sort
of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the
upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you
insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through
his nose.  But then again, what has the whale to say?  Seldom have I known
any profound being that had anything to say to this
world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.
Oh!  happy that the world is such an excellent listener!  Now, the spouting
canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the conveyance of air,

     and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the upper
surface of his head, and a little to one side; this curious canal is very
much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street.  But the
question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words,

     whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath,

     or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth,
and discharged through the spiracle.  It is certain that the mouth indirectly
communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this is
for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle.  Because the
greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he
accidentally takes in water.  But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath the
surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would.  Besides, if you regard
him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that when
unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and
the ordinary periods of respiration.  But why pester one with all this
reasoning on the subject?  Speak out!  You have seen him spout; then declare
what the spout is; can you not tell water from air?  My dear sir, in this
world it is not so easy to settle these plain things.  I have ever found your
plain things the knottiest of all.  And as for this whale spout, you might
almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.  The
central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and
how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always,
when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his spout, he is
in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around him.  And if at
such times you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in
the spout, how do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapor;

     or how do you know that they are not those identical drops superficially
lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the
whale's head?  For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day
sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the
desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his
head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled
up with rain.  Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious
touching the precise nature of the whale spout.  It will not do for him to be
peering into it, and putting his face in it.  You cannot go with your pitcher
to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away.  For even when coming into
slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often
happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so
touching it.  And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with the
spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot
say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm.  Wherefore, among whalemen,
the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it.  Another thing; I have
heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted
into your eyes, it will blind you.  The wisest thing the investigator can do
then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone.  Still, we can
hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish.  My hypothesis is this:
that the spout is nothing but mist.  And besides other reasons, to this
conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent
dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow
being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on
soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are.  He is both
ponderous and profound.  And I am convinced that from the heads of all
ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante,
and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the
act of thinking deep thoughts.  While composing a little treatise on Eternity,

     I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected
there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my
head.  The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this
seems an additional argument for the above supposition.  And how nobly it
raises our conceit of the mighty, misty
monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his
vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his
incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor --as you will sometimes see it
--glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his
thoughts.  For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only
irradiate vapor.  And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a
heavenly ray.  And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions.  Doubts of all
things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination
makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both
with equal eye.

     Other poets have warbled the praises of
the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never
alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail.  Reckoning the largest sized
Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to
about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area
of at least fifty square feet.  The compact round body of its root expands
into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less
than an inch in thickness.  At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly
overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide
vacancy between.  In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely
defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes.  At its utmost
expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty
feet across.  The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded
sinews; but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:
--upper, middle, and lower.  The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long
and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise
between the outside layers.  This triune structure, as much as anything else,
imparts power to the tail.  To the student of old Roman walls, the middle
layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles always
alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique, and
which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry.
But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the
whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular
fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down
into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their
might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole
whale seems concentrated to a point.  Could annihilation occur to matter, this
were the thing to do it.  Nor does this --its amazing strength, at all tend to
cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease
undulates through a Titanism of power.  On the contrary, those motions derive
their most appalling beauty from it.  Real strength never impairs beauty or
harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful,
strength has much to do with the magic.  Take away the tied tendons that all
over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charm
would be gone.  As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the naked
corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that
seemed as a Roman triumphal arch.  When Angelo paints even God the Father in
human form, mark what robustness is there.  And whatever they may reveal of
the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian
pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these
pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any
power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance,
which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his
teachings.  Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that
whether wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it
be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace.  Therein no
fairy's arm can transcend it.  Five great motions are peculiar to it.  First,
when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle;
Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.  First:

     Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in a different
manner from the tails of all other sea creatures.  It never wriggles.  In man
or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority.  To the whale, his tail is the
sole means of propulsion.  Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body, and
then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives that singular darting,
leaping motion to the monster when furiously swimming.  His side-fins only
serve to steer by.  Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm
whale only fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless,
in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail.  In
striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow
is only inflicted by the recoil.  If it be made in the unobstructed air,
especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible.

     No ribs of man or boat can withstand it.  Your only salvation lies in eluding
it; but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing
to the light buoyancy of the whaleboat, and the elasticity of its materials,
a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is
generally the most serious result.  These submerged side blows are so often
received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play.  Some one

     strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped.  Third: I cannot demonstrate it,

     but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense of touch is concentrated in
the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the
daintiness of the elephant's trunk.  This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the
action of sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft
slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the
sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and
all.
What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch!  Had this tail any
prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant
that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented
nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones.  On more accounts than
one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in
his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded in
the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart.  Fourth: Stealing
unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle of solitary
seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and
kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth.  But still you see
his power in his play.  The broad palms of his tail are flirted high into the
air; then smiting the surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles.
You would almost think a great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed
the light wreath of vapor from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would
think that that was the smoke from the touch-hole.  Fifth: As in the ordinary
floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie considerably below the level
of his back, they are then completely out of sight beneath the surface; but
when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least
thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating
a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view.  Excepting the sublime

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

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

     yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American
vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.

     With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits;
Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence, cruising
northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by the Sperm
whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of
Japan, in time for the great whaling season there.  By these means, the
circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising
grounds of the world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific;
where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon
giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at
a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.  But how
now?  in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land?  does his crew drink air?
Surely, he will stop for water.  Nay.  For a long time, now, the circus-running
sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in
himself.  So Ahab.  Mark this, too, in the whaler.  While other hulls are
loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the
world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their
weapons and their wants.  She has a whole lake's contents bottled in her ample
hold.  She is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead
and kentledge.  She carries years' water in her.  Clear old prime Nantucket
water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer,
in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday
rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams.  Hence it is, that,
while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again,
touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not
have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating
seamen like themselves.  So that did you carry them the news that another
flood had come; they would only answer -- Well, boys, here's the ark!  Now,
as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the
near vicinity of the straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground,
roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for
cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the
look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake.  But
though the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow,
and with delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet
not a single jet was descried.  Almost renouncing all thought of falling in
with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when
the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of
singular magnificence saluted us.  But here be it premised, that owing to the
unwearied activity with which of late they have been hunted over all four
oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small
detached companies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in
extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would
almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and
covenant for mutual assistance and protection.  To this aggregation of the
Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that
even in the best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and
months together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be
suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.  Broad on
both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a great
semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of
whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noon-day air.  Unlike the
straight perpendicular
twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, falls over in two
branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single
forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of
white mist, continually rising and falling away to leeward.  Seen from the
Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the sea, this host
of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a
blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys
of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some
horseman on a height.  As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in
the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous
passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the
plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward
through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle,
and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.  Crowding all sail
the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling their weapons, and
loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats.  If the wind only
held, little doubt had they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda,
the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the capture
of not a few of their number.  And who could tell whether, in that congregated
caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the
worshipped white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese!  So
with stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these
leviathans before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard,
loudly directing attention to something in our wake.  Corresponding to the
crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear.  It seemed formed of
detached white vapors, rising and falling something like the spouts of the
whales; only they did not so completely come and go; for they constantly
hovered, without finally disappearing.  Levelling his glass at this sight,
ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying, aloft there, and rig whips
and buckets to wet the sails; --Malays, sir, and after us!
As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly
have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit, to
make up for their over-cautious delay.  But when the swift Pequod, with a fresh
leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very kind of these tawny
philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit, --
mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they were.  As with glass under arm,
Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he
chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some
such fancy as the above seemed his.  And when he glanced upon the green walls
of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him
that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that
through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly
end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman
atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses; --when
all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's brow was left gaunt
and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing
it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place.  But thoughts
like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when, after steadily
dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at last shot by the
vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the
broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the
swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship
had so victoriously gained upon the Malays.  But still driving on in the wake
of the whales, at length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship
neared them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the
boats.  But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of
the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,
--though as yet a mile in their rear, --than they rallied again, and forming in
close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like flashing
lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.  Stripped to our
shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash,
and after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase,
when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that
they were now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert
irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he
is gallied.  The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto
rapidly and steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout;
and like King Porus' elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they
seemed going mad with consternation.  In all directions expanding in vast
irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short
thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic.  This
was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely
paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on
the sea.  Had these leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over
the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such
excessive dismay.  But this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost
all herding creatures.  Though banding together in tens of thousands, the
lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman.
Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of
a theatre's pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush
helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and
remorselessly dashing each other to death.  Best, therefore, withhold
any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly
of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of
men.  Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
retreated, but collectively remained in one place.  As is customary in those
cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale on
the outskirts of the shoal.  In about three minutes' time, Queequeg's harpoon
was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then
running away with us like light, steered straight for the heart of the herd.
Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under such
circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more
or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes
of the fishery.  For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into
the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a
delirious throb.  As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer

     power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as
we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a
ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their
complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be
locked in and crushed.  But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully;
now sheering off from this monster directly across our route in advance; now
edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while
all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of
our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time
to make long ones.  Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted
duty was now altogether dispensed with.  They chiefly attended to the shouting
part of the business.  Out of the way, Commodore!  cried one, to a great
dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant
threatened to swamp us.  Hard down with your tail, there!  cried a second
to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with
his own fan-like extremity.  All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances,

     originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs.  Two thick
squares of wood of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they
cross each other's grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is
then attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line
being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon.  It is chiefly
among gallied whales that this drugg is used.  For then, more whales are close
round you than you can possibly chase at one time.  But sperm whales are not
every day encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can.  And
if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be
afterwards killed at your leisure.  Hence it is, that at times like these the
drugg comes into requisition.  Our boat was furnished with three of them.
The first and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales
staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the
towing drugg.  They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball.
But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy
wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an
instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the boat's
bottom as the seat slid from under him.  On both sides the sea came in at the
wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so
stopped the leaks for the time.  It had been next to impossible to dart these
drugged-harpoons, were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's
way greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further
from the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning.  So
that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways
vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided
between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some
mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake.  Here the storms in the
roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt.  In this
central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a
sleek, produced
by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods.  Yes,
we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every
commotion.  And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the
outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in
each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a
ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might
easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have gone round on their
backs.  Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more
immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of
escape was at present afforded us.  We must watch for a breach in the living
wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut
us up.  Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by
small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.  Now,
inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer
circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of
those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole
multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles.  At any
rate --though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive --spoutings
might be discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the
rim of the horizon.  I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and
calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the
wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise
cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and
every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these
smaller whales --now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the
lake --evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still
becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at.  Like household dogs
they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them;

     till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them.
Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his
lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting
it.
But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side.  For, suspended in
those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales,
and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.  The
lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent;
and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the
breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing
mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly
reminiscence; --even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards
us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born
sight.  floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.
One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a
day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet
in girth.  He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet
recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the
maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring,
the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow.  The delicate side-fins, and
the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled
appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts.  Line!  line!
cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; him fast!  him fast! --Who line
him!  Who struck?  Two whale; one big, one little!  What ails ye, man?
cried Starbuck.  Look-e here, said Queequeg pointing down.  As when the
stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope;
as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling
line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw
long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub
seemed still tethered to its dam.  Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the
chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled
with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped.  Some of the
subtlest secrets of the seas
seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond.  We saw young Leviathan amours
in the deep.  And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of
consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre
freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely
revelled in dalliance and delight.  But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic
of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and
while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep
inland there i still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.  Meanwhile, as we
thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in the distance
evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drugging the whales
on the frontier of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within the first

     circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded
them.  But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly
darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our
eyes.  It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly
powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or
maiming his gigantic tail-tendon.  It is done by darting a short-handled
cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again.  A
whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually,
as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of
the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now
dashing among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado
Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went.  But
agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough,
any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of
the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance
obscured from us.  But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable
accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line
that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while
the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in
the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had
worked loose from his flesh.  So that tormented to madness, he was now
churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and
tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.
this terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary
fright.  First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a
little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows
from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the
submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more
contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in
thickening clusters.  Yes, the long calm was departing.  A low advancing hum
was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the
great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came
tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common
mountain.  Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking
the stern.  Oars!  Oars!  he intensely whispered, seizing the helm -- gripe
your oars, and clutch your souls, now!  My God, men, stand by!  Shove him off,
you Queequeg --the whale there! --prick him! --hit him!  Stand up --stand up, and
stay so!  Spring, men -- pull, men; never mind their backs --scrape them!
--scrape away!  The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks,
leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths.  But by desperate
endeavor we at last shot into a temporary
opening; then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching
for another outlet.  After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last
swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now
crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre.  This lucky
salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while
standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean
from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad
flukes close by.  Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was,
it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having
clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward
flight with augmented fleetness.  Further pursuit was useless; but the boats
still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped
astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed.  The
waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat;
and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the
floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also
as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.
The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying
in the Fishery, --the more whales the less fish.  Of all the drugged whales
only one was captured.  The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only
to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.

To gally, or gallow, is to frighten excessively --to confound with fright.
It is an old Saxon word.  It occurs once in Shakespeare: -- The wrathful skies

     Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make them keep their caves.  To
common language, the word is now completely obsolete.  When the polite
landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set it
down as one of the whaleman's self-derived savageries.  Much the same is it
with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to
New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the
time of the Commonwealth.  Thus, some of the best and furthest-descended
English words --the etymological Howards and Percys --are now democratised, nay,
plebeianised --so to speak --in the New World.
The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike
most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation
which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time;
though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob: -- a
contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one
on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from
that.  When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the
hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor
the sea for rods.  The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by
man; it might do well with strawberries.  When overflowing with mutual
esteem, the whales salute more hominum.

     The previous chapter
gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also
then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations.  Now, though
such great bodies are at times encountered, yet,
as must have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are
occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.  Such
bands are known as schools.  They generally are of two sorts; those composed
almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous
males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.  In cavalier attendance
upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude,
but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the
rear and covering the flight of his ladies.  In truth, this gentleman is a
luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly
accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem.  The contrast
between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is
always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full
growth, are not more than one third of the bulk of an average-sized male.
They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a
dozen yards round the waist.  Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point.  It is very curious
to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings.  Like
fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety.
You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial
feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in
the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and
warmth.  By the time they have lounged up and down the promenade of the
Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the
cool season there, and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year.
When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious
sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family.
Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to
draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the

     Bashaw assails him, and chases him away!  High times, indeed, if
unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity
of domestic bliss; though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most
notorious Lothario out
of his bed; for, alas!  all fish bed in common.  As ashore, the ladies often
cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the
whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love.  They fence
with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving
for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers.  Not a
few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters, --furrowed heads,
broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated
mouths.  but supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at
the first rush of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to watch that
lord.  Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there
awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon
devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines.  Granting other whales to
be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand
Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength, and hence
their unctuousness is small.  As for the sons and the daughters they beget,
why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at least, with
only the maternal help.  For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that
might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for
the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies
all over the world; every baby an exotic.  In good time, nevertheless, as the
ardor of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends
her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk;

     then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman
enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life, forswears,
disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about
all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning
each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.  Now, as the harem of whales is
called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord and master of that school
technically known as the schoolmaster.  It is therefore not in strict
character, however admirably satirical, that after going to school himself,
he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly
of it.  His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally
seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have
surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale,
must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a
country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what
was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.

     The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes
himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales.  Almost
universally, a lone whale --as a solitary Leviathan is called --proves an
ancient one.  Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one
near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of
waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody
secrets.  The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools.  For while those
female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all
Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting
those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will
fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.  The Forty-barrel-bull
schools are larger than the harem schools.  Like a mob of young collegians,
they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such
a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them
any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard.  They soon relinquish
this turbulence though, and when about three fourths grown, break up, and
separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.  Another point
of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic
of the sexes.  Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull --poor devil!  all his
comrades quit him.  But strike a member of the harem school, and her
companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering
so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.

     The allusion to the waifs
and waif-poles in the last chapter but one, necessitates some account of the
laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed
the grand symbol and badge.  It frequently happens that when several ships are
cruising in company, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and
be finally killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly
comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature.
For example, --after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the
body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting
far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a calm, snugly
tows it alongside, without risk of life or line.  Thus the most vexatious and
violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some
written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases.
Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was
that of Holland.  It was decreed by the States-General in A. D.
.  But
though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American
fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter.  They
have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's
Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of
Meddling with other People's Business.  Yes; these laws might be engraven on a
Queen Anne's farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so
small are they.  I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.  II.  A
Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.  But what plays
the mischief with this masterly code is the
admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to
expound it.  First: What is a Fast-Fish?  Alive or dead a fish is technically
fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at
all controllable by the occupant or occupants, -- a mast, an oar, a nine-inch
cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.  Likewise
a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised
symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their
ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to
do.  These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks --the
Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist.  True, among the more upright and honorable
whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an
outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale
previously chased or killed by another party.  But others are by no means so
scrupulous.  Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover
litigated in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard
chase of a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs)
had succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself.

     Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up with the whale,
struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the very eyes of
the plaintiffs.  And when those defendants were remonstrated with, their
captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs' teeth, and assured them that by
way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now retain their line,
harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the whale at the time of
the seizure.  Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value
of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.  Mr. Erskine was counsel for the
defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge.  In the course of the defence,
the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent

     crim.  con.  case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his
wife's viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon
the seas of life; but in the course of years, repenting of that step, he
instituted an action to recover possession of her.  Erskine was on the other
side; and he then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had
originally harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason
of the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had as last abandoned her;
yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore when
a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent
gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon might have been found
sticking in her.  Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples
of the whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.  These
pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very learned judge
in set terms decided, to wit, --That as for the boat, he awarded it to the
plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save their lives; but
that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged

     to the defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the
final capture; and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with
them, it (the fish) acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody
who afterwards took the fish had a right to them.  Now the defendants
afterwards took the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.  A common
man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might possibly object
to it.  But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter, the two great
principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously quoted, and applied
and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited case; these two laws
touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the
fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; For notwithstanding its complicated
tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the
Philistines, has but two props to stand on.  Is it not a saying in every one's
mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing
came into possession?  But often possession is the whole of the law.  What are
the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves
but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law?  What to the
rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish?  What is yonder
undetected villain's marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is
that but a Fast-Fish?  What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker,
gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family
from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish?  What is the
archbishop of Savesoul's income of 100,000 pounds seized from the scant bread
and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of
heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a
Fast-Fish?  What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but
Fast-Fish?  What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland,
but a Fast-Fish?  What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas
but a Fast-Fish?  And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of
the law?  But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the
kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so.  That is
internationally and universally applicable.  What was America in

     but a
loose-fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing
it for his royal master and mistress?  What was Poland to the Czar?  What
Greece to the Turk?  What India to England?  What at last will Mexico be to
the United States?  All Loose-Fish.  What are the Rights of Man and the
Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?  What all men's minds and opinions but

     Loose-Fish?  What is the principle of religious belief in them but a
Loose-Fish?  What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of
thinkers but Loose-Fish?  What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?
And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

     De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat
caput, et regina caudam.  Bracton, l 3.  c. 3.  Latin from the books of the
Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of all whales
captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand
Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with
the tail.  A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple;
there is no intermediate remainder.  Now as this law, under a modified form,
is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a
strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here
treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that
prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially
reserved for the accommodation of royalty.  In the first place, in curious
proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I proceed to

     lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two years.  It
seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the
Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine
whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore.  Now the
Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of
policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.  Holding the office directly from
the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port
territories become by assignment his.  By some writers this office is called a
sinecure.  But not so.  Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times
in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same
fobbing of them.  Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and
with their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled
their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good 150 pounds from the
precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and
good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares;
up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a
copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale's head, he
says -- Hands off!  this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish.  I seize it as the
Lord Warden's.  Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation
--so truly English --knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching
their heads all round;  meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the
stranger.  But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard
heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone.  At length one of
them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak.  Please,
sir, who is the Lord Warden?  The Duke.  But the duke had nothing to do
with taking this fish?  It is his.  We have been at great trouble, and
peril, and some expense, and is all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we
getting nothing at all for our pains but our blisters?  It is his.  Is the
duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a
livelihood?  It is his.  I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by
part of my share of this whale.  It is his.  Won't the Duke be content
with a quarter or a half?  It is his.  In a word, the whale was seized and
sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington received the money.  Thinking that
viewed in some particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in
some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an
honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace,
begging him to take the case of those unfortunate
mariners into full consideration.  To which my Lord Duke in substance replied
(both letters were published) that he had already done so, and received the
money, and would be obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he
(the reverend gentleman) would decline meddling with other people's business.

     Is this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three
kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?  It will readily be seen that
in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the whale was a delegated one
from the Sovereign.  We must needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign
is originally invested with that right.  The law itself has already been set
forth.  But Plowdon gives us the reason for it.  Says Plowdon, the whale so
caught belongs to the King and Queen, because of its superior excellence.
And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument
in such matters.  But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the
tail?  A reason for that, ye lawyers!  In his treatise on Queen-Gold, or
Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench author, one William Prynne, thus
discourseth: Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied
with ye whalebone.  Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone
of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices.  But this
same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for
a sagacious lawyer like Prynne.  But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented
with a tail?  An allegorical meaning may lurk here.  There are two royal fish
so styled by the English law writers -- the whale and the sturgeon; both royal
property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch
of the crown's ordinary revenue.  I know not that any other author has hinted
of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be
divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and
elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may
possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality.  And thus
there seems a reason in all things, even in law.

     In vain it was to rake
for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying
not inquiry.  Sir T. Browne, V. E.  It was a week or two after the last
whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy,
vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod's deck proved more
vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft.  A peculiar and not
very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.  I will bet something now, said
Stubb, that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled
the other day.  I thought they would keel up before long.  Presently, the
vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose
furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside.  As we
glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak; and by the
eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped
around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen
call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea,
and so floated an unappropriated corpse.  It may well be conceived, what an
unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the
plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed.  So intolerable
indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor
alongside of it.  Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding
the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior
quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.  Coming still nearer
with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale
alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the
first.  In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that
seem
to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion;
leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil.
Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will
ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun
blasted whales in general.  The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger,
that Stubb vowed he recognized his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines
that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales.  There's a pretty
fellow, now, he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship's bows, there's
a jackal for ye!  I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor
devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking

     them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with
their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers,
foreseeing that all the oil they will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's
wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo
that is content with our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and
is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has
there.  Poor devil!  I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a
present of a little oil for dear charity's sake.  For what oil he'll get from
that drugged whale there, wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a
condemned cell.  And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get more oil
by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he'll get from
that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain
something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris.  I wonder now if
our old man has thought of that.  It's worth trying.  Yes, I'm for it; and
so saying he started for the quarter-deck.  By this time the faint air had
become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly
entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up
again.  Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat's crew, and pulled
off for the stranger.  Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance
with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in
the likeness of a
huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes
projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical
folded bulb of a bright red color.  Upon her head boards, in large gilt
letters, he read Bouton de Rose, --Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was
the romantic name of this aromatic ship.  Though Stubb did not understand the

     Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word rose, and the bulbous
figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the whole to him.  A wooden
rose-bud, eh?  he cried with his hand to his nose, that will do very well;
but how like all creation it smells!  Now in order to hold direct
communication with the people on deck, he had to pull round the bows to the
starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale; and so talk over
it.  Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled
-- Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy!  are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak
English?  Yes, rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out
to be the chief-mate.  Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the
White Whale?  What whale?  The White Whale --a Sperm Whale --Moby Dick,
have ye seen him?  Never heard of such a whale.  Cachalot Blanche!  White
Whale --no.  Very good, then; good bye now, and I'll call again in a
minute.  Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab
leaning over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two
hands into a trumpet and shouted -- No, Sir!  No!  Upon which Ahab retired,
and Stubb returned to the Frenchman.  He now perceived that the Guernsey-man,
who had just got into the chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his

     nose in a sort of bag.  What's the matter with your nose, there?  said Stubb.

     Broke it?

     I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all!  answered the
Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much.  But
what are you holding yours for?  Oh, nothing!  It's a wax nose; I have to
hold it on.  Fine day, aint it?  Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us
a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?  What in the devil's name do you
want here?  roared the Guernsey-man, flying into a sudden passion.  Oh!
keep cool--cool?  yes, that's the word; why don't you pack those whales in ice
while you're working at 'em?  But joking aside, though; do you know,
Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales?  As
for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in his whole carcase.  I
know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe it;
this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before.  But come
aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me; and so I'll get out of
this dirty scrape.  Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,
rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck.  There a queer
scene presented itself.  The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were
getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales.  But they worked rather
slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor.  All
their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms.  Now
and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the mast-head to
get some fresh air.  Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum
in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils.  Others having
broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously

     puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories.
Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the
Captain's round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face
thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within.  This was the
tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of
the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's round-house ( cabinet he
called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his
entreaties and indignations at times.
Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had
brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.  Sounding him
carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the
slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris.  He therefore held his peace on
that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so that
the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing
the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity.
According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an
interpreter's office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming
from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come
uppermost in him during the interview.  By this time their destined victim
appeared from his cabin.  He was a small and dark, but rather delicate looking
man for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore
a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side.  To this gentleman,
Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once
ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them.  What shall I
say to him first?  said he.  Why, said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the
watch and seals, you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort
of babyish to me, though I don't pretend to be a judge.  He says, Monsieur,

     said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain, that only
yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six
sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought
alongside.  Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.

     What now?  said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.  Why, since he takes it so easy,
tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no
more fit to command a whale-ship than a St.  Jago monkey.  In fact, tell him
from me he's a baboon.

     He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far
more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we
value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.  Instantly the captain ran
forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to desist from hoisting the
cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the
whales to the ship.  What now?  said the Guernsey-man, when the captain had
returned to them.  Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that --
that --in fact, tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps
somebody else.  He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any
service to us.  Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful
parties (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into
his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.  He wants you to take a glass of wine
with him, said the interpreter.  Thank him heartily; but tell him it's
against my principles to drink with the man I've diddled.  In fact, tell him
I must go.  He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his
drinking; but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then
Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these
whales, for it's so calm they won't drift.  By this time Stubb was over the
side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernsey-man to this effect,
--that having a long tow-line in his boat, he would do what he could to help
them, by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship's side.  While
the Frenchman's boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb
benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking
out a most unusually long tow-line.  Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb
feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon
increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's
whale.  Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body,
and hailing the pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to
reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning.  Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he
commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin.  You would
almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at
length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old
Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam.  His boat's crew were all
in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as
gold-hunters.  And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them.  Stubb was beginning to look
disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly
from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of
perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed
by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without at
all blending with it for a time.  I have it, I have it, cried Stubb, with
delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, a purse!  a
purse!  Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls
of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese;
very unctuous and savory withal.  You might easily dent it with your thumb;
it is of a hue between yellow and ash color.  And this, good friends, is
ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.  Some six handfuls
were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more,
perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab's loud command
to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them good
bye.

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

     a
certain Nantucket-born
Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that
subject.  for at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the
precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the
learned.  Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber,

     yet the two substances are quite distinct.  For amber, though at times found
on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris
is never found except upon the sea.  Besides, amber is a hard, transparent,
brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and
ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy,
that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles,
hair-powders, and pomatum.  The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to
Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St.  Peter's in
Rome.  Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.  Who
would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!
Yet so it is.  By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others
the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale.  How to cure such a dyspepsia it
were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of
Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in
blasting rocks.  I have forgotten to say that there were found in this
ambergris, certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought
might be sailors' trousers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they
were nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in
the heart of such decay; is this nothing?  Bethink thee of that saying of St.
Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown
in dishonor, but raised in glory.  And likewise call to mind that saying of
paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk.  Also forget not the
strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its
rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.  I should like to conclude the
chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a
charge often made
against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds,
might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the
Frenchman's two whales.  Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has
been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly,
untidy business.  But there is another thing to rebut.  They hint that all
whales always smell bad.  Now how did this odious stigma originate?  I opine,
that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling
ships in London, more than two centuries ago.  Because those whalemen did not
then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have
always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it
through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the
shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms
to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course.  The consequence is,
that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading one of these whale
cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to
that arising from excavating an old city grave-yard, for the foundations of
a Lying-in Hospital.  I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against
whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland,
in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg,
which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
work on Smells, a textbook on that subject.  As its name imports (smeer, fat;

     berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place for
the blubber of the dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being taken
home to Holland for that purpose.  It was a collection of furnaces,
fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation
certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor.  But all this is quite different
from a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years perhaps,
after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty
days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked, the
oil is nearly scentless.  The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently
treated, whales as a species are by no
means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of
the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose.  Nor
indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general
thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out
of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air.  I say, that the
motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a
musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.  What then shall I liken
the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude?  Must it not be
to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which
was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great?

     It was but some few days after
encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant event befell the most
insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an event most lamentable; and which
ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a
living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove
her own.  Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats.
Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work
the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale.  As a general thing, these
ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats' crews.  But
if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the
ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper.  It was so in the
Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation.  Poor
Pip!  ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine on that
dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color, driven in one
eccentric span.  But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in
his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright,
with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe,
which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than
any other race.  For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three
hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days.  Nor smile so,
while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has
its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets.  But
Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable securities; so that the
panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become
entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be
seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to
be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off
to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in
Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and
at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha!  had turned the round horizon into
one star-belled tambourine.  So, though in the clear air of day, suspended
against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful
glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most
impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it
up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases.  Then come out those fiery
effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the
divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from
the King of Hell.  But let us to the story.  It came to pass, that in the
ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman chanced so to sprain his hand, as
for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was put into his
place.  The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;
but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing him,
took care, afterwards,
to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he might often
find it needful.  Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the
whale; and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap,
which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat.  The
involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand,
out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming
against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become
entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water.  That instant the
stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and
presto!  poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat,
remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns around
his chest and neck.  Tashtego stood in the bows.  He was full of the fire of
the hunt.  He hated Pip for a poltroon.  Snatching the boat-knife from its
sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,
exclaimed interrogatively, cut?  meantime pip's blue, choked face plainly
looked, Do, for God's sake!  All passed in a flash.  In less than half a
minute, this entire thing happened.  Damn him, cut!  roared Stubb; and so
the whale was lost and Pip was saved.  So soon as he recovered himself, the
poor little negro was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew.
Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a
plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially;
and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice.  The substance
was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except --but all the rest was indefinite,
as the soundest advice ever is.  Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is
your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap

     from the boat, is still better.  Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if
he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him
too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all
advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, Stick to the boat, Pip, or
by the Lord, I wont pick you up if you jump; mind that.  We can't afford
to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what
you would, Pip, in Alabama.  Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more.
Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow,
yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with
his benevolence.  But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped
again.  It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but
this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started
to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk.
Alas!  Stubb was but too true to his word.  It was a beautiful, bounteous,
blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all
round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest.
Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves.

     No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern.  Stubb's inexorable
back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged.  In three minutes, a
whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb.  Out from the centre
of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun,
another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.  Now, in calm
weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to
ride in a spring-carriage ashore.  But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable.
The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity,

     my God!  who can tell it?  Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in
the open sea --mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her
sides.  But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate?  No;

     he did not mean to, at least.  Because there were two boats in his wake, and
he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly,
and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen
jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the
hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur;
almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same
ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying
whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat
was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that
Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably.  By the merest
chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little
negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was.  The
sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his
soul.  Not drowned entirely, though.  Rather carried down alive to wondrous
depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro
before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded
heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the
multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of
waters heaved the colossal orbs.  He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the
loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.  So man's
insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes
at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic;
and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.  For the
rest, blame not Stubb too hardly.  The thing is common in that fishery; and
in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment
befell myself.

     That whale of Stubb's so dearly
purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and
hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to

     the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.  While some were occupied with
this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so
soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same
sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.  It
had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others,
I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely
concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part.  It
was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid.  A sweet and unctuous
duty!  no wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic.
Such a clearer!  such a sweetener!  such a softener!  such a delicious
mollifier!  After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers
felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.  As I sat
there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the
windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and
gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle
globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly

     broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe
grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, --literally and
truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the
time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in
that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost
began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue
in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely
free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze!  squeeze!  squeeze!  all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till
I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of
insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my
co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.  Such
an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget;

     that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into
their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, --Oh!  my dear fellow beings, why
should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest
ill-humor or envy!  Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all
squeeze ourselves
into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
sperm of kindness.  Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!  For

     now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in
all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of
attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy;

     but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side,
the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case

     eternally.  In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.  Now, while
discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the
business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.  First comes
white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish,
and also from the thicker portions of his flukes.  It is tough with congealed
tendons --a wad of muscle --but still contains some oil.  After being severed
from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going
to the mincer.  They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.  Plum-pudding
is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here
and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a
considerable degree in its unctuousness.  It is a most refreshing, convivial,
beautiful object to behold.  As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly
rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with
spots of the deepest crimson and purple.  It is plums of rubies, in pictures
of citron.  Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it.  I
confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it.  It tasted something
as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might
have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison
season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually
fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.

There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the
course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately
to describe.  It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the
whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance.  It is an ineffably
oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a
prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.  I hold it to be the
wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.  Gurry, so
called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes
incidentally used by the sperm fishermen.  It designates the dark, glutinous
substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and
much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble
Leviathan.  Nippers.  Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's
vocabulary.  But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so.  A whaleman's nipper
is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of
Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is
about the size of the iron part of a hoe.  Edgewise moved along the oily deck,

     it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of
magic, allures along with it all impurities.  But to learn all about these
recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room,

     and have a long talk with its inmates.  This place has previously been
mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted
from the whale.  When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents,
this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night.  On one
side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen.
They generally go in pairs, --a pike-and-gaff-man and a spade-man.  The
whaling-pike is similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same name.  The
gaff is something like a boat-hook.  With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a
sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches
and lurches about.  Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself,
perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces.  This spade is
sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing
he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge.
If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be
very much astonished?  Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.

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

     occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for
an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!
Bible leaves!  Bible leaves!  This is the invariable cry from the mates to
the mincer.  It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin
slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the

     oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides
perhaps improving it in quality.

     Besides her hoisted boats, an American
whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works.  She presents the curious
anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting
the completed ship.  it is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were
transported to her planks.  The try-works are planted between the foremast and
main-mast, the most roomy part of the deck.  The timbers beneath are of a
peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of
brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height.  The
foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to
the surface by
ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the
timbers.  On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered
by a large, sloping, battened hatchway.  Removing this hatch we expose the
great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity.  When
not in use, they are kept remarkably clean.  Sometimes they are polished
with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls.
During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and
coil themselves away there for a nap.  While employed in polishing them --one
man in each pot, side by side --many confidential communications are carried
on, over the iron lips.  It is a place also for profound mathematical
meditation.  It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the
soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by
the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid,
my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same
time.  Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare
masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the
furnaces, directly underneath the pots.  These mouths are fitted with heavy
doors of iron.  The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating
itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire

     inclosed surface of the works.  By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this
reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates.  There are
no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall.  And here let us
go back for a moment.  It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's
try-works were first started on this present voyage.  It belonged to Stubb to
oversee the business.  All ready there?  Off hatch, then, and start her.  You
cook, fire the works.  This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been
thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage.  Here be it
said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed
for a time with wood.  After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick
ignition to the staple fuel.  In a word, after being tried out, the crisp,
shrivelled
blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its
unctuous properties.  These fritters feed the flames.  Like a plethoric
burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale
supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.  Would that he consumed his
own smoke!  for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and
not only that, but you must live in it for the time.  It has an unspeakable,
wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal
pyres.  It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument
for the pit.  By midnight the works were in full operation.  We were clear
from the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild
ocean darkness was intense.  But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.
The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful
deed.  So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris,
issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails,
bore down upon the turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.  The
hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front
of them.  Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers,

     always the whale-ship's stokers.  With huge pronged poles they pitched
hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires
beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch
them by the feet.  The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps.  To every pitch of
the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to
leap into their faces.  Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side
of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass.  This served for a sea-sofa.
Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red
heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads.  Their tawny
features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and
the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely
revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.  As they
narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in
words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them,
like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the
harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as
the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and

     yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of
the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth,
and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted
with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into
that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her
monomaniac commander's soul.  So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm,
and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea.
Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the
redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others.  The continual sight of the
fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at
last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that
unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
thing occurred to me.  Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly
conscious of something fatally wrong.  The jaw-bone tiller smote my side,
which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning
to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of
putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further
apart.  But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by;

     though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the
steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.  Nothing seemed before me but a jet
gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness.  Uppermost was the
impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much
bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.  A stark,
bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.  Convulsively my hands grasped
the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow,
in some enchanted way, inverted.  My God!  what is the matter with me?  thought
I.  Lo!  in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the
ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the compass.  In an instant I faced

     back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and
very probably capsizing her.  How glad and how grateful the relief from this
unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being
brought by the lee!  look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!  Never
dream with thy hand on the helm!  Turn not thy back to the compass; accept
the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when
its redness makes all things look ghastly.  To-morrow, in the natural sun,
the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames,

     the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious,
golden, glad sun, the only true lamp --all others but liars!  Nevertheless the
sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide
Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the
moon.  The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth,
and which is two thirds of this earth.  So, therefore, that mortal man who
hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true --not true,
or undeveloped.  With books the same.  The truest of all men was the Man of
Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the
fine hammered steel of woe.  All is vanity.  ALL.  This wilful world hath
not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet.  But he who dodges hospitals
and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of
operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of
sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing
wise, and therefore jolly; --not that man is fitted to sit down on
tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous
Solomon.  But even Solomon, he says, the man that wandereth out of the way
of understanding shall remain ( i.  e.  even while living) in the congregation
of the dead.  Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee,
deaden thee; as for the time it did me.
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.  And there
is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest
gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.
And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the
mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still
higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

     Had you descended from the Pequod's
try-works to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping,

     for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in
some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors.  There they lay in
their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of
lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.  In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is
more scarce than the milk of queens.  To dress in the dark, and eat in the
dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot.  But the

     whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light.  He makes his
berth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest
night the ship's black hull still houses an illumination.  See with what
entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps --often but old bottles
and vials, though --to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes
them there, as mugs of ale at a vat.  He burns, too, the purest of oil, in
its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to
solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore.  It is sweet as early grass
butter in April.  He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its
freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his
own supper of game.

     Already has it been
related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how
he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the
deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the
principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the
beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the property of his
executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed
through the fire; --but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this
part of the description by rehearsing --singing, if I may -- the romantic
proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into
the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities,
sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas!  never more to rise
and blow.  While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this
way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and
headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery
deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their
course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play
upon them, for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper.  At length, when
the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are
unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to
their final rest in the sea.  This done, the hatches are replaced, and
hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.  In the sperm fishery, this is
perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling.
One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred
quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled; great
rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has
besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness;
the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is
deafening.  But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears
in this self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and
try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel,
with a most scrupulously neat commander.  The unmanufactured sperm oil
possesses a singularly cleansing virtue.  This is the reason why the decks
never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil.  Besides,
from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent ley is readily
made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains
clinging to the side, that ley quickly exterminates it.  Hands go diligently
along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their
full tidiness.  The soot is brushed from the lower rigging.  All the numerous
implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put
away.  The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works, completely
hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles are coiled in
unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost
the entire ship's company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last
concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift
themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh
and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.  Now,
with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously
discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the
deck; think of having hangings to the top; object not to taking tea by
moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle.  To hint to such musked mariners of

     oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity.  They know not the
thing you distantly allude to.  Away, and bring us napkins!  But mark: aloft
there, at the three mast heads, stand three
men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again
soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot
somewhere.  Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted
labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six
hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day

     rowing on the Line, --they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and
heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very
sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial
sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have
finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy
room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of
their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of There she blows!  and away
they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again.
Oh!  my friends, but this is man-killing!  Yet this is life.  For hardly have
we mortals by long toilings extracted from the world's vast bulk its small but
valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its
defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul;
hardly is this done, when -- There she blows! --the ghost is spouted up, and
away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old
routine again.  Oh!  the metempsychosis!  Oh!  Pythagoras, that in bright
Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I
sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage -- and, foolish as I am,
taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!

     Ere now it has been related how Ahab was
wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the
binnacle
and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it
has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in
his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there
strangely eyeing the particular object before him.  When he halted before the
binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that
glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and
when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same
riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the
same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if
not hopefulness.  But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed
to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it,
as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some
monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them.  And some certain
significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the
round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as
they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.  Now
this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of
gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of
many a Pactolus flows.  And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron
bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to
any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow.  Nor, though placed amongst
a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the
livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering
approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left

     it last.  For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and
however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as
the white whale's talisman.  Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch
by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever
live to spend it.  Now those noble golden coins of South America are as
medals of the sun and tropic token-pieces.  Here palms, alpacas, and
volcanoes; sun's disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich
banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold
seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by
passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.  It so chanced that
the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things.  On its
round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO.  So this
bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and
beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway
up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn.  Zoned by those
letters you saw the likeness of three Andes' summits; from one a flame; a
tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a
segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual
cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.
Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing.

     There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all
other grand and lofty things; look here, --three peaks as proud as Lucifer.
The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the
undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this
round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's
glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious
self.  Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it
cannot solve itself.  Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but
see!  aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox!  and but six months
before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries!  From storm to storm!  So
be it, then.  Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die
in pangs!  So be it, then!  Here's stout stuff for woe to work on.  So be it,
then.  No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must
have left their mouldings there since yesterday, murmured Starbuck to
himself, leaning against the bulwarks.  The old
man seems to read Belshazzar's awful writing.  I have never marked the coin
inspectingly.  He goes below; let me read.  A dark valley between three
mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
earthly symbol.  So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all
our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope.  If we
bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them,

     the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer.  Yet, oh, the great sun
is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace
from him, we gaze for him in vain!  This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly,
but still sadly to me.  I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.  There
now's the old Mogul, soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, he's been twigging
it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I
should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long.  And all from looking
at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer's
Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere spending it.  Humph!  in my poor,
insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer.  I have seen doubloons before
now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru,
your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of
Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes,
and quarter joes.  what then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator
that is so killing wonderful?  By Golconda!  let me read it once.  Halloa!
here's signs and wonders truly!  That, now, is what old Bowditch in his
Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls ditto.  I'll get
the almanack and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's
arithmetic, I'll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer
curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar.  Here's the book.  Let's see
now.  Signs and wonders; and the sun, he's always among 'em.  Hem, hem, hem;

     here they are --here they go --all alive: --Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the
Bull and Jimimi!  here's Gemini himself, or the Twins.  Well; the sun he
wheels among 'em.  Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the threshold
between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring.  Book!  you lie there; the
fact is, you books must know your
places.  You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to
supply the thoughts.  That's my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts
calendar, and Bowditch's navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic go.  Signs and
wonders, eh?  Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in
wonders!  There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark!  By Jove, I have
it!  Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round
chapter; and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book.  Come, Almanack!

     To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram --lecherous dog, he begets us; then,
Taurus, or the Bull --he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins --

     that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo!  comes Cancer
the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring
Lion, lies in the path --he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his
paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin!  that's our first love; we marry
and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales --happiness

     weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord!  how
we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear; we are
curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the
Archer, is amusing himself.  As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside; here's
the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and
headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his
whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we
sleep.  There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through
it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty.  Jollily he,
aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly
Stubb.  Oh, jolly's the word for aye!  Adieu, Doubloon!  But stop; here comes
little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll
have to say.  There; he's before it; he'll out with something presently.  So,
so; he's beginning.  I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold,
and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him.  So,
what's all this staring been about?  It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true;

     and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and
sixty cigars.  I wont smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and
here's nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em
out.  Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of
wiseish look to it.  But, avast; here comes our old Manxman --the old
hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea.  He
luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of the
mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he's back
again; what does that mean?  Hark!  he's muttering --voice like an old
worn-out coffee-mill.  Prick ears, and listen!  If the White Whale be
raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of
these signs.  I've studied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me
two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen.  Now, in what sign will
the sun then be?  The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the
gold.  And what's the horse-shoe sign?  The lion is the horse-shoe sign --the
roaring and devouring lion.  Ship, old ship!  my old head shakes to think of
thee.  There's another rendering now; but still one text.  All sorts of men
in one kind of world, you see.  Dodge again!  here comes Queequeg --all
tattooing --looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself.  What says the
Cannibal?  As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks
the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as
the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country.  And by Jove, he's

     found something there in the vicinity of his thigh --I guess it's Sagittarius,
or the Archer.  No: he don't know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it
for an old button off some king's trowsers.  But, aside again!  here comes
that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the
toes of his pumps as usual.  What does he say, with that look of his?  Ah,
only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin
--fire worshipper, depend upon it.  Ho!  more and more.  This way comes Pip
--poor boy!  would he had died, or I; he's half horrible to me.  He too has
been watching all of these interpreters --myself included --and look now, he
comes to read,
with that unearthly idiot face.  stand away again and hear him.  hark!  I
look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.  Upon my soul,
he's been studying Murray's Grammar!  Improving his mind, poor fellow!  But
what's that he says now -- hist!  I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye
look, they look.  Why, he's getting it by heart --hist!  again.  I look,
you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.  Well, that's funny.

     And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow,
especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here.  Caw!  caw!  caw!  caw!  caw!
caw!  Ain't I a crow?  And where's the scare-crow?  There he stands; two
bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves
of an old jacket.  Wonder if he means me? --complimentary! --poor lad! --I
could go hang myself.  Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity.
I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too crazy-witty
for my sanity.  So, so, I leave him muttering.  Here's the ship's navel,
this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it.  But, unscrew
your navel, and what's the consequence?  Then again, if it stays here, that
is ugly, too, for when aught's nailed to the mast it's a sign that things grow

     desperate.  Ha, ha!  old Ahab!  the White Whale; he'll nail ye!  This is a
pine tree.  My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and
found a silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey's wedding ring.  How
did it get there?  And so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to
fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters
for the shaggy bark.  Oh, the gold!  the precious, precious gold! --the green
miser 'll hoard ye soon!  Hish!  hish!  God goes 'mong the worlds
blackberrying.  Cook!  ho, cook!  and cook us!  Jenny!  hey, hey, hey, hey,
hey, Jenny, Jenny!  and get your hoe-cake done!


    

     ENDERBY, OF LONDON Ship, ahoy!  Hast seen the White Whale?  So cried Ahab,
once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down under the
stern.  Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted
quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who
was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow.  He was a darkly-tanned,
burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in
a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth;
and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of
a huzzar's surcoat.  Hast seen the White Whale?  See you this?  and
withdrawing it from the fold that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of
sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet.  Man my boat!
cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him -- Stand by to
lower!  In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and
his crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.
But here a curious difficulty presented itself.  In the excitement of the
moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once
stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by
an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod,
and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's
warning.  Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody --except those who are
almost hourly used to it, like whalemen --to clamber up a ship's side from a
boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards

the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson.
so, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether
unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced
to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height
he could hardly hope to attain.  It has before been hinted, perhaps, that
every little untoward circumstance that befel him, and which indirectly
sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated
Ahab.  And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of
the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair
of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink
them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea
bannisters.  But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange
captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, I see, I see!
--avast heaving there!  Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle.  As
good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved
blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end.  This was
quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary
thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of an
anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the word, held
himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own weight, by
pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle.  Soon he
was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the
capstan head.  With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other
captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory
arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, Aye, aye,
hearty!  let us shake bones together! --an arm and a leg! --an arm that never
can shrink, d'ye see; and a leg that never can run.  Where did'st thou see
the White Whale? --how long ago?  The White Whale, said the Englishman,
pointing his ivory
arm towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
telescope; There I saw him, on the Line, last season.  And he took that
arm off, did he?  asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting
on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so.  Aye, he was the cause of it, at
least; and that leg, too?  Spin me the yarn, said Ahab; how was it?  It
was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line, began the
Englishman.  I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.  Well, one day
we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of
them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling
round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their
sterns on the outer gunwale.  Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea
a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and
wrinkles.  It was he, it was he!  cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his
suspended breath.  And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.  Aye,
aye --they were mine -- my irons, cried Ahab, exultingly -- but on!  Give me a
chance, then, said the Englishman, good-humoredly.  Well, this old
great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod,
and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line.  Aye, I see! --wanted to part
it; free the fast-fish --an old trick --I know him.  How it was exactly,
continued the one-armed commander, I do not know; but in biting the line, it
got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn't know it then; so
that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his
hump!  instead of the other whale's that went off to windward, all fluking.
Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was --the noblest
and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life --I resolved to capture him, spite of
the boiling rage he seemed to be in.  And thinking the hap-hazard line would

     get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have
a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say,
I jumped into my first mate's boat --Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way, Captain
--Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain); --as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's
boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching

     the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.  But, Lord, look
you, sir --hearts and souls alive, man --the next instant, in a jiff, I was
blind as a bat --both eyes out --all befogged and bedeadened with black foam
--the whale's tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air,
like a marble steeple.  No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at
midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say,
after the second iron, to toss it overboard --down comes the tail like a Lima
tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes
first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips.
We all struck out.  To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my
harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking
fish.  But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish,
taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that
cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here (clapping his hand
just below his shoulder); yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down
to Hell's flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the
good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh --clear along the whole length
of my arm --came out nigh my wrist, and up i floated; --and that gentleman
there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain --Dr.  Bunger, ship's
surgeon: Bunger, my lad, -- the captain).  Now, Bunger boy, spin your part
of the yarn.  The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had
been all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to
denote his gentlemanly rank on board.  His face was an exceedingly round but
sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched
trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike
he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other, occasionally casting
a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled captains.  But, at his
superior's introduction of him to Ahab, he
politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain's bidding.  It was
a shocking bad wound, began the whale-surgeon; and, taking my advice,
Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy-- Samuel Enderby is the name of
my ship, interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; go on, boy.

     Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot
weather there on the Line.  But it was no use --I did all I could; sat up with
him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet-- Oh, very
severe!  chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his voice,

     Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn't see to put on
the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o'clock in
the morning.  Oh, ye stars!  he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe
in my diet.  Oh!  a great watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr.
Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out!  why don't ye?  You know you're a
precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I'd rather be killed by you
than kept alive by any other man.  My captain, you must have ere this
perceived, respected sir --said the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger,
slightly bowing to Ahab -- is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many

     clever things of that sort.  But I may as well say --en passant, as the French
remark --that I myself --that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend
clergy --am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink-- Water!  cried the
captain; he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to him; fresh water
throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on --go on with the arm story.  Yes,
I may as well, said the surgeon, coolly.  I was about observing, sir, before
Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest
endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it
was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several
inches long.  I measured it with the lead line.  In short, it grew black; I
knew what was threatened, and off it came.
But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all
rule --pointing at it with the marlingspike -- that is the captain's work,
not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there
put to the end, to knock some one's brains out with, I suppose, as he tried
mine once.  He flies into diabolical passions sometimes.  Do ye see this
dent, sir --removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a
bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace,

     or any token of ever having been a wound -- Well, the captain there will tell
you how that came here; he knows.  No, I don't, said the captain, but
his mother did; he was born with it.  Oh, you solemn rogue, you --you Bunger!
was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world?  Bunger, when you
die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future
ages, you rascal.  What became of the White Whale?  now cried Ahab, who
thus far had been impatiently listening to this bye-play between the two
Englishmen.  Oh!  cried the one-armed captain, Oh, yes!  Well; after he
sounded, we didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted,
I didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till
some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick
--as some call him --and then I knew it was he.  Did'st thou cross his wake
again?  Twice.  But could not fasten?  Didn't want to try to: ain't one
limb enough?  What should I do without this other arm?  And I'm thinking Moby
Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows.  Well, then, interrupted Bunger,

     give him your left arm for bait to get the right.  Do you know, gentlemen
--very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession -- Do
you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so
inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for
him to completely digest even a
man's arm?  And he knows it too.  So that what you take for the White Whale's
malice is only his awkwardness.  For he never means to swallow a single limb;
he only thinks to terrify by feints.  But sometimes he is like the old
juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe
swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest,

     and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic,
and he heaved it up in small tacks, d'ye see.  No possible way for him to
digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily
system.  Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a
mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to
the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have
another chance at you shortly, that's all.  No, thank ye, Bunger, said the
english captain, he's welcome to the arm he has, since I can't help it,
and didn't know him then; but not to another one.  No more White Whales for
me; I've lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me.  There would be
great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of
precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's best let alone; don't you think
so, Captain? --glancing at the ivory leg.  He is.  But he will still be
hunted, for all that.  What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not
always what least allures.  He's all a magnet!  How long since thou saw'st him
last?  Which way heading?  Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's,
cried Bunger,  stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely
snuffing; this man's blood --bring the thermometer; --it's at the boiling
point! --his pulse makes these planks beat! --sir! --taking a lancet from his
pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm.  Avast!  roared Ahab, dashing him
against the bulwarks -- Man the boat!  Which way heading?  Good God!  cried
the English Captain, to whom the question was put.  What's the matter?  He
was heading east, I think. --Is your Captain crazy?  whispering Fedallah.

     But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks
to take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle
towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower.  In a moment
he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men were springing to
their oars.  In vain the English Captain hailed him.  With back to the
stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till
alongside of the Pequod.

     Ere the English ship fades from sight, be
it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the late
Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling
house of enderby and sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion,
comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in
point of real historical interest.  How long, prior to the year of our Lord 0083
, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents
do not make plain; but in that year (
) it fitted out the first English
ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of
years previous (ever since
) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket
and the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the
North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere.  Be it distinctly recorded here,
that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized
steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the only
people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.  In
, a fine ship, the
Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the sole charge of the
vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the
nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the great South Sea.  The
voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold
full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other
ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the
Pacific were thrown open.  But not content with this good deed, the
indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons --how
many, their mother only knows --and under their immediate auspices, and
partly, I think, at their expense, the British government was induced to send
the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea.
Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it,
and did some service; how much does not appear.  But this is not all.  In 0084
, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go on
a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan.  That ship --well called the

     Syren --made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great
Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known.  The Syren in this
famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.  All honor to
the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present day;
though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for
the great South Sea of the other world.  The ship named after him was worthy
of the honor, being a very fast sailer and a noble craft every way.  I
boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank
good flip down in the forecastle.  It was a fine gam we had, and they were all
trumps --every soul on board.  A short life to them, and a jolly death.  And
that fine gam I had --long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with
his ivory heel -- it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever lose
sight of it.  Flip?  Did I say we had flip?  Yes, and we flipped it at the
rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it's squally off
there by Patagonia), and all hands --visitors and all --were called to reef
topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft in
bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into
the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning
example to all drunken tars.  However, the masts did not go overboard; and by
and bye we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again,
though the savage salt spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too
much diluted and pickled it to my taste.  The beef was fine --tough, but with
body in it.  They said it was bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef;
but i do not know, for certain, how that was.  they had dumplings too; small,
but substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings.  I
fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were
swallowed.  If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching
out of you like billiard-balls.  The bread --but that couldn't be helped;
besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the only
fresh fare they had.  But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very
easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it.  But all in all, taking
her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook's boilers,
including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel
Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong;
crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.  But why was it,
think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English whalers I know of
--not all though --were such famous, hospitable ships; that passed round the
beef, and the bread, and the can, and the joke; and were not soon weary
of eating, and drinking, and laughing?  I will tell you.  The abounding good
cheer of these English whalers is matter for historical research.  Nor have I
been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders,
and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery;
and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty to eat and
drink.  For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew;
but not so the English whaler.  Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling
good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental and particular; and,
therefore, must have some special origin,
which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.  During my
researches in the leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch
volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about
whalers.  The title was, Dan Coopman, wherefore I concluded that this must
be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every
whale ship must carry its cooper.  I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing
that it was the production of one Fitz Swackhammer.  But my friend Dr.
Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the
college of Santa Claus and St.  Pott's, to whom I handed the work for
translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble -- this same
Dr.  Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that Dan Coopman did
not mean The Cooper, but The Merchant.  In short, this ancient and
learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other
subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery.  And in
this chapter it was, headed Smeer, or Fat, that I found a long detailed
list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen;

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

     Hitherto, in descriptively
treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his
outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural
features.  But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it
behoves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his
hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of
the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that
is to say, in his unconditional skeleton.  But how now, Ishmael?  How is it,
that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the
subterranean parts of the whale?  Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your
capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the
windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition?  Explain thyself, Ishmael.
Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook
dishes a roast-pig?  Surely not.  A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the
privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole,
sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan; and
belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his
bowels.  I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with
an opportunity to dissect him in miniature.  In a ship I belonged to, a small
cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to
make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.

     Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and
jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that young
cub?
And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic,
full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late
royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.  For being at
Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was
invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at
his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far distant from
what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.  Among many other fine
qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all
matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella whatever rare
things the more ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of

     wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles,
aromatic canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders,
the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.  Chief
among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long
raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a
cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet.
When the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathom-deep enfoldings,
and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully
transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now
sheltered it.  The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved
with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent
forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw
vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted
damocles.  it was a wondrous sight.  the wood was green as mosses of the icy
Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the
industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet on
it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the
living flowers the figures.  All the trees, with all their laden branches;
all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all
these unceasingly were active.  Through the lacings of the leaves, the great
sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.  Oh, busy weaver!
unseen weaver! --pause! --one word! -- whither flows the fabric?  what palace may
it deck?  wherefore all these ceaseless toilings?  Speak, weaver! --stay thy
hand! -- but one single word with thee!  Nay --the shuttle flies --the figures

     float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away.
The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears
no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are
deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that
speak through it.  For even so it is in all material factories.  The spoken
words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are
plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements.  Thereby
have villanies been detected.  Ah, mortal!  then, be heedful; for so, in all
this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard
afar.  Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging --a gigantic idler!  Yet, as the
ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty
idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines;
every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton.  Life
folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life,
and begat him curly-headed glories.  Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited
this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke
ascending from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king
should regard a chapel as an object of vertu.  He laughed.  But more I
marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine.  To
and fro I paced before this skeleton --brushed the vines aside --broke through
the ribs --and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid
its many winding, shaded collonades and arbors.  But soon my line was out;
and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.  I saw no
living thing within; naught was there but bones.
Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the
altitude of the final rib.  How now!  they shouted; Dar'st thou measure
this our god!  That's for us.  Aye, priests --well, how long do ye make him,
then?  But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and
inches; they cracked each other's sconces with their yard-sticks -- the great
skull echoed --and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own
admeasurements.  These admeasurements I now propose to set before you.  But
first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any
fancied measurement I please.  Because there are skeleton authorities you can
refer to, to test my accuracy.  There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me,
in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have
some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales.  Likewise, I have heard
that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the
proprietors call the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in
the United States.  Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton
constable by name, a certain sir clifford constable has in his possession the
skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the
full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.  In both cases, the stranded
whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were originally claimed by
their proprietors upon similar grounds.  King Tranquo seizing his because he
wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those
parts.  Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a
great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities
--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan --and swing all day upon his lower
jaw.  Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a
footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side.
Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery
in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his
cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.  The
skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are
copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such
valuable statistics.  But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other
parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing --at
least, what untattooed parts might remain --I did not trouble myself with the
odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial
admeasurement of the whale.

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

     which measured eight feet and some inches.  From that part, the remaining
ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some
inches.  In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence to their
length.  The middle ribs were the most arched.  In some of the Arsacides they
are used for beams whereon to lay foot-path bridges over small streams.  In
considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance,

     so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no
means the mould of his invested form.  The largest of the Tranque ribs, one
of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest
in depth.  Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular
whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib
measured but little more than eight feet.  So that this rib only conveyed half
of the true notion of the living
magnitude of that part.  Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked
spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh,
muscle, blood, and bowels.  Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a
few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless

     flukes, an utter blank!  How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid
untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely
poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.
no.  only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of
his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested
whale be truly and livingly found out.  But the spine.  For that, the best way
we can consider it is, with a crane, to pile its bones high up on end.  No
speedy enterprise.  But now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.
There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not
locked together.  They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic
spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry.  The largest, a middle one, is
in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four.  The
smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in
width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball.  I was told that there
were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal
urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with.
Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off
at last into simple child's play.

     From his mighty bulk the whale
affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally
expatiate.  Would you, you could not compress him.  By good rights he
should only be treated of in imperial folio.  Not to tell over again his
furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist;
only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in
him like great cables and hausers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck
of a line-of-battle-ship.  Since I have undertaken to manhandle this
Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the
enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and
spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.  Having already described
him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now
remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian
point of view.  Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan --to an ant or
a flea --such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent.
But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered.  Fain am I to stagger to
this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary.  And here be it
said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of
these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson,
expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's
uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a
whale author like me.  One often hears of writers that rise and swell with
their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one.  How, then, with me,
writing of this Leviathan?  Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
capitals.  Give me a condor's quill!  Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!

     Friends, hold my arms!  For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this
Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching
comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the
sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past,
present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth,
and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.  Such, and so
magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme!  We expand to its
bulk.  To produce a mighty book, you must choose a
mighty theme.  No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,
though many there be who have tried it.  Ere entering upon the subject of
Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my
miscellaneous time i have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of
ditches, canals, and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.
Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while
in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now
almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are
called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate
intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose
remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales
hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last
preceding the superficial formations.  And though none of them precisely
answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently
akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking ranks as Cetacean
fossils.  Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their
bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals,
been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in
Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  Among the
more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year

     was
disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost
directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in
excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time.  Cuvier pronounced
these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.
But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost complete
vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year
, on the
plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama.  The awe-stricken credulous slaves in
the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels.  The Alabama
doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of
Basilosaurus.  But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to
owen, the english anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a
whale, though of a departed species.
A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book,

     that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his
fully invested body.  So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his
paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance,
one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have
blotted out of existence.  When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons,
skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial
resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time
bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that
wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began
with man.  Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering

     glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed
hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this
world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible.

     Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his
wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs.  Who can show a
pedigree like Leviathan?  Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the
Pharaoh's.  Methuselah seems a school-boy.  I look round to shake hands with
Shem.  I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the
unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must
needs exist after all humane ages are over.  But not alone has this Leviathan
left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature, and in
limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets,
whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we
find the unmistakable print of his fin.  In an apartment of the great temple
of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite
ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs,
griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial
globe of the moderns.  Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was
there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the
whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the venerable
John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.  Not far from the Sea-side, they have a
Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales
of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore.  The Common
People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no
Whale can pass it without immediate death.  But the truth of the Matter is,
that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into
the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em.  They keep a Whale's
Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with
its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be
reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back.  This Rib (says John Leo) is said to
have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it.  Their Historians affirm,
that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do
not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at
the Base of the Temple.  In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you,
reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship

     there.

     Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the
head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the
long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk
of his sires.  But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of
the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found
in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to man),

     but of the whales found in that
Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed in size
those of its earlier ones.  Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far
the largest is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was
less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton.  Whereas, we have already
seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a
large sized modern whale.  And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that
Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of
capture.  But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it
not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?  Assuredly, we must
conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such gentlemen as Pliny,
and the ancient naturalists generally.  For Pliny tells us of whales that
embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight

     hundred feet in length --Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!  And even in
the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member
of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales
(reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that
is, three hundred and sixty feet.  And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his

     elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3),
sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and
twenty-eight feet.  And this work was published so late as A. D.
.  But
will any whaleman believe these stories?  No.  The whale of to-day is as big
as his ancestors in Pliny's time.  And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a
whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so.  Because I
cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried
thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in
their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and
other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the
relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the
high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far
exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of
all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have
degenerated.  But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the
more recondite Nantucketers.  Whether owing to the almost omniscient
look-outs at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through
Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the
world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental
coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase,

     and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from
the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and
then himself evaporate in the final puff.  Comparing the humped herds of
whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago,
overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and
shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the
sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land
at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem
furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.

     But you must look at this matter in every light.  Though so short a period
ago --not a good life-time --the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the
census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or
hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this
wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of
the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan.
Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whale for forty-eight months think
they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the
oil of forty fish.  Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters

     and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still
rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for
the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships,
would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact
that, if need were, could be statistically stated.  Nor, considered aright,
does it seem any argument in favor
of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former
years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small
pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence,
the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative.
Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some
views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large
degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days
are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies.  That is
all.  And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called
whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with
them, hence that species also is declining.  For they are only being driven
from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their
jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently
startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.  Furthermore: concerning these last
mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human
probability, will for ever remain impregnable.  And as upon the invasion of
their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so,
hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales
can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate
glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in
a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from
man.  But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.  But
though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000 have
been annually slain on the nor' west coast by the Americans alone; yet there
are considerations which render even this circumstance of little or no account
as an opposing argument in this matter.  Natural as it is to be somewhat
incredulous concerning the populousness of the more enormous creatures of the
globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells
us that at one hunting the King of Siam took

     elephants;
that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the
temperate climes.  And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants,

     which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus,
by hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East --if they still
survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all
hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as
large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the
Isles of the sea combined.  Moreover: we are to consider, that from the
presumed great longevity of whales, their probably attaining the age of a
century and more, therefore at any one period of time, several distinct
adult generations must be contemporary.  And what that is, we may soon gain
some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults
of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children
who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to the
present human population of the globe.  Wherefore, for all these things, we
account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his
individuality.  He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once
swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin.  In
Noah's flood, he despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again
flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale
will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial
flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.

     The precipitating manner in which Captain
Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with
some small violence to his own person.  He had lighted with such energy upon a
thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had
received a half-splintering shock.  And when after gaining his own deck, and
his own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent
command to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering
inflexibly enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional
twist and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all
appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.  And,
indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad
recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that
dead bone upon which he partly stood.  For it had not been very long prior to
the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying
prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly
inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently
displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin;
nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely
cured.  Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a
former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous
reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events
do naturally beget their like.  Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since

     both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and
posterity of Joy.  For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from
certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have
no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be
followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty

     mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally
progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this,
there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing.  For,
thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain
unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a
mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their
diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction.  To trail the
genealogies
of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless
primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making
suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to
this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad.  The ineffaceable, sad
birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
properly, in set way, have been disclosed before.  With many other particulars
concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that
for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he
had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for
that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble
senate of the dead.  Captain Peleg's bruited reason for this thing appeared by
no means adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every
revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light.
But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least.  That direful
mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness.  And not only this, but
to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason,
possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid
circle the above hinted casualty --remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted
for by Ahab --invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the
land of spirits and of wails.  So that, through their zeal for him, they had
all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this
thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval
had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's decks.  But be all this as it
may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes
and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this
present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures; --he called the
carpenter.  And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him
without delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him
supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had
thus far been accumulated
on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of the stoutest,
clearest-grained stuff might be secured.  This done, the carpenter received
orders to have the leg completed that night; and to provide all the fittings
for it, independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use.
Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary
idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was
commanded to proceed at once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances
might be needed.

     Seat thyself sultanically among the
moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder,
a grandeur, and a woe.  But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and
for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both
contemporary and hereditary.  But most humble though he was, and far from
furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter
was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage.  Like all
sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling
vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike experienced
in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the carpenter's
pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous
handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material.

     but, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this
carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless
mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three
or four years' voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas.  For not to speak
of his readiness in ordinary duties: --repairing stove boats, sprung spars,
reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's
eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other
miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he
was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes,
both useful and capricious.  The one grand stage where he enacted all his
various parts so manifold, was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table
furnished with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of
wood.  At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely
lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.  A belaying pin is
found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it
into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files it smaller.  A lost
land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of
clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory,

     the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it.  An oarsman sprains his
wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion.  Stubb longed for vermillion
stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his
big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation.  A
sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his
ears.  Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping
one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow
unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the
handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that,
if he would have him draw the tooth.  Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all
points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all.  Teeth he
accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he
lightly held for capstans.  But while now upon so wide a field thus variously
accomplished, and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this
would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence.  But not precisely
so.  For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal
stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the
surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general
stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while
pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and
ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals.  Yet was this
half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an
all-ramifying heartlessness; --yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,
crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then
with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time

     during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark.  Was it
that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to
and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off
whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him?  He
was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born
babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.  You
might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort
of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so
much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it,
or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of
deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process.  He was a pure manipulator; his
brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of
his fingers.  He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful,

     multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior -- though a
little swelled --of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of
various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens,
rulers, nail-filers, counter-sinkers.  So, if his superiors wanted to use the
carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of
him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs,
and there they were.  Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled,
open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton.  If
he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow
anomalously did its duty.  What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a
few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling.  But there it was; and there it
had abided for now some sixty years or more.  And this it was, this same
unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a
great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel,
which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and
this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself
awake.

    
(Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two lanterns
busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly fixed in the
vice.  Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and various tools of all
sorts lying about the bench.  Forward, the red flame of the forge is seen,
where the blacksmith is at work.) Drat the file, and drat the bone!  That is
hard which should be soft, and that soft which should be hard.  So we go,
who file old jaws and shinbones.  Let's try another.  Aye, now, this works
better ( sneezes).  Halloa, this bone dust is ( sneezes)-- why it's
( sneezes)--yes it's ( sneezes)--bless my soul, it won't let me speak!  This is
what an old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber.  Saw a live tree, and
you don't get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don't get it
( sneezes).  Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have
that ferule and buckle-screw; I'll be ready for them presently.  Lucky now
( sneezes) there's no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a
mere shinbone --why it's easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to put a
good finish on.  Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn him
out as neat a leg now as ever ( sneezes) scraped to a lady in a parlor.  Those

     buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in shop windows wouldn't compare
at all.  They soak water, they do; and of
course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored ( sneezes) with washes and
lotions, just like live legs.  There; before I saw it off, now, I must call
his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right; too short,
if anything, I guess.  Ha!  that's the heel; we are in luck; here he comes,
or it's somebody else, that's certain.  Ahab ( advancing). (During the
ensuing scene, the carpenter continues sneezing at times).  Well, manmaker!
Just in time, sir.  If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length.  Let
me measure, sir.  Measured for a leg!  good.  Well, it's not the first time.
About it!  There; keep thy finger on it.  This is a cogent vice thou hast
here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once.  so, so; it does pinch some.
Oh, sir, it will break bones--beware, beware!  No fear; I like a good grip; I
like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.  What's
Prometheus about there? --the blacksmith, I mean --what's he about?  He must be
forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.  Right.  It's a partnership; he supplies
the muscle part.  He makes a fierce red flame there!  Aye, sir; he must have
the white heat for this kind of fine work.  Um-m.  So he must.  I do deem it
now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they
say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's
made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable.  How the
soot flies!  This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of.
Carpenter, when he's through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of
steel shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.  Sir?
Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a
desirable pattern.  Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest
modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to 'em, to stay in
one place; then, arms three
feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a
quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see --shall I order eyes to see
outwards?  No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards.
There, take the order, and away.  Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he
speaking to, I should like to know?  Shall I keep standing here? ( aside).
'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here's one.  No, no,
no; I must have a lantern.  Ho, ho!  That's it, hey?  Here are two, sir; one
will serve my turn.  What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face
for, man?  thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.  i thought, sir,
that you spoke to carpenter.  Carpenter?  why that's --but no; --a very tidy,
and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here,
carpenter; --or would'st thou rather work in clay?  Sir? --Clay?  clay, sir?
That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.  The fellow's impious!  What art
thou sneezing about?  Bone is rather dusty, sir.  Take the hint, then; and
when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people's noses.  Sir?
--oh!  ah! --I guess so; so; --yes, yes --oh dear!  Look ye, carpenter, I dare say
thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh!  Well, then, will
it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg
thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical
place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one,
I mean.  Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?  Truly, sir, I begin to
understand somewhat now.  Yes, I have heard something curious on that score,
sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old
spar, but it will be still pricking him at times.  May I humbly ask if it be
really so, sir?  It is, man.  Look, put thy live leg here in the place where
mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye,
yet two to the soul.  Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there,

     there to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle?  I should humbly call it a poser, sir.

     Hist, then.  How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may
not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now
standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?  In thy most solitary hours,
then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers?  Hold, don't speak!  And if I still
feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then,
why mayest not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and
without a body?  Hah!  Good Lord!  Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must
calculate over again; I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir.  Look ye,
pudding-heads should never grant premises. --How long before this leg is
done?  Perhaps an hour, sir.  Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me
(turns to go).  Oh, Life!  Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing
debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!  Cursed be that mortal
inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers.  I would be free as
air; and I'm down in the whole world's books.  I am so rich, I could have
given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman
empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I
brag with.  By heavens!  I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve
myself down to one small, compendious vertebra.  So.  Carpenter ( resuming

     his work).  Well, well, well!  Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb
always says he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word
queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer--queer, queer; and keeps dinning
it into Mr. Starbuck all the time -- queer, sir --queer, queer, very queer.  And
here's his leg!  Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow!  has a
stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife!  And this is his leg; he'll stand on
this.  What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all
three places standing in one hell --how was that?  Oh!  I don't wonder he
looked so scornful at me!  I'm a sort of strange-thoughted
sometimes, they say; but that's only haphazard-like.  Then, a short, little
old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with
tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick,
and there's a great cry for life-boats.  And here's the heron's leg!  long and

     slim, sure enough!  Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime,
and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old
lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses.  But Ahab; oh he's a hard driver.
Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears
out bone legs by the cord.  Halloa, there, you Smut!  bear a hand there with
those screws, and let's finish it before the resurrection fellow comes
a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round
collecting old beer barrels, to fill 'em up again.  What a leg this is!  It
looks like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he'll be
standing on this to-morrow; he'll be taking altitudes on it.  Halloa!  I
almost forgot the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the
latitude.  So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!

     According to usage they
were pumping the ship next morning; and lo!  no inconsiderable oil came up
with the water; the casks below must have sprung a bad leak.  Much concern
was shown; and Starbuck went down into the cabin to report this unfavorable
affair.
Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the
Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China
waters into the Pacific.  And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of
the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one
representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands -- Niphon,
Matsmai, and Sikoke.  With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the
screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his
hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling
his brow, and tracing his old courses again.  Who's there?  hearing the
footstep at the door, but not turning round to it.  On deck!  Begone!

     captain ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir.  We
must up Burtons and break out.  Up Burtons and break out?  Now that we are
nearing Japan; heave-to here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?

     Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a
year.  What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir.  So
it is, so it is; if we get it.  I was speaking of the oil in the hold,
sir.  And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all.  Begone!  Let it
leak!  I'm all aleak myself.  Aye!  leaks in leaks!  not only full of leaky
casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that's a far worse
plight than the Pequod's, man.  Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can
find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in
this life's howling gale?  Starbuck!  I'll not have the Burtons hoisted.

     What will the owners say, sir?  Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and
outyell the Typhoons.  What cares Ahab?  Owners, owners?  Thou art always
prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my
conscience.  But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander;
and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship's keel. --On deck!  Captain
Ahab, said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin, with a daring
so strangely respectful and cautious that
it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward
manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of
itself; A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would
quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye!  and in a happier, Captain
Ahab.  Devils!  Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?
--On deck!  Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat.  And I do dare, sir --to be
forbearing!  Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain
ahab?  ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
exclaimed: There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain
that is lord over the Pequod. --On deck!  For an instant in the flashing eyes
of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost thought that he had
really received the blaze of the levelled tube.  But, mastering his emotion,
he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and
said: Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, Sir; but for that I ask thee not
to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab;
beware of thyself, old man.  He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most
careful bravery that!  murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared.  What's that
he said --Ahab beware of Ahab --there's something there!  Then unconsciously
using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the
little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.  Thou art but too good a
fellow, Starbuck, he said lowly to the mate; then raising his voice to the
crew: Furl the t'gallant-sails and close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft;
back the main-yard; up Burtons, and break out in the main-hold.  It were
perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting Starbuck,
Ahab thus acted.  It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or mere
prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade the
slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient, in the important
chief
officer of his ship.  However it was, his orders were executed; and the
Burtons were hoisted.
In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a
regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the
casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by
the ship's pumps.  Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight; while
by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect
any serious leakage in the precious cargo.

     Upon searching, it was found
that the casks last struck into the hold were perfectly sound, and that the
leak must be further off.  So, it being calm weather, they broke out deeper
and deeper, disturbing the slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from
that black midnight sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above.  So
deep did they go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the
lowermost puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone
cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards,
vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood.  Tierce after tierce,
too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of
hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were hard to get
about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over
empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an air-freighted
demijohn.  Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle
in his head.  Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them then.  Now, at
this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast bosom-friend,
Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to his endless end.

     Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher
you rise the harder you toil.  So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer,
must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but --as we have
elsewhere seen -- mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend
into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that
subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see
to their stowage.  To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the
holders, so called.  Poor Queequeg!  when the ship was about half
disembowelled, you should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down
upon him there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage
was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard
at the bottom of a well.  And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to
him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings,
he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after some

     days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door
of death.  How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days,
till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing.  But as
all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes,
nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange
softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his
sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not
die, or be weakened.  And like circles on the water, which, as they grow
fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of
Eternity.  An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the
side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any
beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.  For whatever is truly
wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.  And the
drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a
last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.  So

     that --let us say it again --no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier
thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face
of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling
sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean's invisible
flood-tide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven.  Not a
man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he
thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favor he asked.  He called
one to him in the grey
morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said
that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark
wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had
learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same
dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for
it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead
warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away
to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars are
isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild,
uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white
breakers of the milky way.  He added, that he shuddered at the thought of
being buried in his hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like
something vile to the death-devouring sharks.  No: he desired a canoe like
those of Nantucket, all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that
like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that
involved but uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.  Now,
when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was at once
commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might include.  There was some
heathenish, coffin-colored old lumber aboard, which, upon a long previous
voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal groves of the Lackaday islands, and
from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to be made.  No sooner was
the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with
all the indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the
forecastle and took Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly
chalking Queequeg's person as he shifted the rule.  Ah!  poor fellow!  he'll
have to die now, ejaculated the Long Island sailor.  Going to his
vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience' sake and general reference, now
transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin was to be, and then
made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches at its extremities.  This
done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to work.
When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he
lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether they
were ready for it yet in that direction.  Overhearing the indignant but
half-humorous cries with which the people on deck began to drive the coffin
away, Queequeg, to every one's consternation, commanded that the thing should

     be instantly brought to him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of
all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they
will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be
indulged.  Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin
with an attentive eye.  He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock
drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one
of the paddles of his boat.  All by his own request, also, biscuits were
then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the
head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and
a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to
be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if
any it had.  He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his
bag and bring out his little god, Yojo.  Then crossing his arms on his breast
with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be
placed over him.  The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there
lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view.

     Rarmai (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be
replaced in his hammock.  But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily
hovering near by all this while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with
soft sobbings, took him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.

     Poor rover!  will ye never have done with all this weary roving?  Where go ye
now?  But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches
are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me?  Seek
out one Pip, who's now been missing long: I think he's in those far
Antilles.  If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for
look!
he's left his tambourine behind; --I found it.  Rig-a-dig, dig, dig!  Now,
Queequeg, die; and I'll beat ye your dying march.  I have heard, murmured
Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, that in violent fevers, men, all
ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is
probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those
ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty
scholars.  So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his
lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes.  Where learned he
that, but there? --Hark!  he speaks again: but more wildly now.  Form two
and two!  Let's make a General of him!  Ho, where's his harpoon?  Lay it
across here. --Rig-a-dig, dig, dig!  huzza!  Oh for a game cock now to sit upon
his head and crow!  queequeg dies game! --mind ye that; queequeg dies game! --
take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game!  I say; game, game, game!
but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a'shiver; --out upon Pip!
Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he's a runaway; a coward, a
coward, a coward!  Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat!  I'd never beat my
tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying
here.  No, no!  shame upon all cowards --shame upon them!  Let 'em go drown
like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat.  Shame!  shame!  During all this,
Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream.  Pip was led away, and the
sick man was replaced in his hammock.  But now that he had apparently made
every preparation for death; now that his coffin was proved a good fit,
Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no need of the carpenter's box:

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

     and so be unsolved to the last.  And this thought it must have been which
suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away
from surveying poor Queequeg -- Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!

     When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged
at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have

     greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication
of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a
thousand leagues of blue.  There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about
this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul
beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried
Evangelist St.  John.  And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures,
wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the
waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions
of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all
that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like
slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their
restlessness.  To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once
beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption.  It rolls the midmost
waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms.  The
same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday
planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous
skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float
milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and

     impenetrable Japans.  Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's
whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating
heart of earth.  Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the
seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.  But few thoughts of Pan stirred
Ahab's brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside
the mizen
rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the
Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with
the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea
in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.  Launched at length
upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified itself.  His firm lips met
like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like
overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted
hull, Stern all!  the White Whale spouts thick blood!

     The blacksmith availing himself of the mild,
summer-cool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in preparation
for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the
begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to
the hold again, after concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but
still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being
now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen
to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their
various weapons and boat furniture.  Often he would be surrounded by an eager
circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons,
and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled.
Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm.
No murmur, no impatience, no petulence did come from him.  Silent, slow, and
solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled
away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the
heavy beating of his heart.  And so it was. --Most miserable!
A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing
in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of
the mariners.  And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had
finally given in; and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful

     story of his wretched fate.  Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's
midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith
half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge
in a leaning, dilapidated barn.  The issue was, the loss of the extremities of
both feet.  Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four
acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act
of the grief of his life's drama.  He was an old man, who, at the age of
nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals
called ruin.  He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to
do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving
wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a
cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove.  But one night, under cover of
darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate
burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything.  And
darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this
burglar into his family's heart.  It was the Bottle Conjuror!  Upon the opening
of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home.  Now,
for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in the
basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always

     had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness,
but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old
husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors
and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout
Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's infants were rocked to slumber.  Oh,
woe on woe!  Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?  Hadst thou
taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then
had the young widow had a
delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream
of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency.  But
Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil
solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse
than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him
easier to harvest.  Why tell the whole?  The blows of the basement hammer
every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter
than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes,
glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell;

     the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down
into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither;
and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his
every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!  Death seems
the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a
launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first
salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery,

     the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still
have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the
all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole
plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures;
and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them
-- Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of
intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.
Come hither!  bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and
abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death.  Come hither!  put up

     thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry
thee!  Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun-rise, and by
fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come!  And so Perth
went a-whaling.

     With matted beard, and swathed in a
bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day, Perth was standing between his
forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand
holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs,
when captain ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking
leathern bag.  While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused;

     till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it
upon the anvil --the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering
flights, some of which flew close to Ahab.  Are these thy Mother Carey's
chickens, Perth?  they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good omen,
too, but not to all; --look here, they burn; but thou--thou liv'st among them
without a scorch.  Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab, answered
Perth, resting for a moment on his hammer; I am past scorching; not easily
can'st thou scorch a scar.  Well, well; no more.  Thy shrunk voice sounds
too calmly, sanely woful to me.  In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of
all misery in others that is not mad.  Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith;
say, why dost thou not go mad?  How can'st thou endure without being mad?  Do
the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad? --What wert thou
making there?  Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in
it.  And can'st thou make it all smooth, again, blacksmith, after such hard
usage as it had?  I think so, sir.  And I suppose thou can'st smoothe
almost any seams and dents; never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?

     Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.

     Look ye here, then, cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with
both hands on Perth's shoulders; look ye here -- here --can ye smoothe out a
seam like this, blacksmith, sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow;;if
thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil,
and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes.  Answer!  Can'st thou smoothe
this seam?  Oh!  that is the one, sir!  Said I not all seams and dents but
one?  aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for
though thou only see'st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone
of my skull -- that is all wrinkles!  But, away with child's play; no more
gaffs and pikes to-day.  Look ye here!  jingling the leathern bag, as if it
were full of gold coins.  I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand
yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale
like his own fin-bone.  There's the stuff, flinging the pouch upon the
anvil.  Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel
shoes of racing horses.  Horse-shoe stubbs, sir?  Why, Captain Ahab, thou
hast here, then, the best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.  I
know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the melted
bones of murderers.  Quick!  forge me the harpoon.  And forge me first, twelve
rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these twelve together
like the yarns and strands of a tow-line.  Quick!  I'll blow the fire.  When
at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by spiralling
them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt.  A flaw!  rejecting
the last one.  Work that over again, Perth.  This done, Perth was about to
begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab stayed his hand, and said he
would weld his own iron.  As, then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered
on the anvil, Perth passing to him the glowing rods, one after the other,
and the hard pressed forge shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee
passed silently, and bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking
some curse or some blessing on the toil.  But, as Ahab looked up, he slid
aside.

     What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?  muttered Stubb,
looking on from the forecastle.  That Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and
smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powder-pan.  At last the shank, in
one complete rod, received its final heat; and as perth, to temper it, plunged
it all hissing into the cask of water near by, the scalding steam shot up
into Ahab's bent face.  Would'st thou brand me, Perth?  wincing for a moment
with the pain; have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?  Pray
God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab.  Is not this harpoon for
the White Whale?  For the white fiend!  But now for the barbs; thou must
make them thyself, man.  Here are my razors --the best of steel; here, and make
the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.  For a moment, the old
blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain not use them.  Take them,
man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup, nor pray till
--but here --to work!  Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by
Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the
blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering
them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.  No, no --no water for
that; I want it of the true death-temper.  Ahoy, there!  Tashtego, Queequeg,
Daggoo!  What say ye, pagans!  Will ye give me as much blood as will cover
this barb?  holding it high up.  A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes.  Three
punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale's barbs were
then tempered.  Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!
deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the
baptismal blood.  Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one

     of hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the
socket of the iron.  A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms
of it taken to the windlass, and
stretched to a great tension.  Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope
hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no
strandings, ahab exclaimed, good!  and now for the seizings.  At one
extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all
braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was then driven
hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was traced half way along
the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with intertwistings of twine.
This done, pole, iron, and rope --like the Three Fates --remained inseparable,

     and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg,
and the sound of the hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank.
But ere he entered his cabin, a light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most
piteous sound was heard.  Oh, Pip!  thy wretched laugh, thy idle but
unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the
black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it!

     Penetrating further and further into the
heart of the Japanese cruising ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the
fishery.  Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen,
and twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily
pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of
sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but
small success for their pains.  At such times, under an abated sun; afloat
all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a
birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that
like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of
dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil
beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that
pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but
conceals a remorseless fang.  These are the times, when in his whale-boat the
rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the
sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship
revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not though
high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when
the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their
hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.  The long-drawn virgin
vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the
hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these
solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked.

     And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy,
half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.  Nor did such
soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as temporary an effect on
Ahab.  But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret
golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.  Oh,
grassy glades!  oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,
--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, --in ye, men yet
may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting
moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.  Would to God these
blessed calms would last.  But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven
by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.  There is
no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed
gradations, and at the last one pause: --through infancy's unconscious spell,
boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then
scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of
If.  But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys,
and men, and Ifs eternally.  Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no
more?  in what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will
never weary?  Where is the foundling's father hidden?  Our souls are like
those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our
paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.  And that same
day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea,
Starbuck lowly murmured: -- Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his
young bride's eye! --Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy
kidnapping cannibal ways.  Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I
look deep down and do believe.  And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales,
leaped up in that same golden light: -- I am Stubb, and Stubb has his
history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!

     And jolly enough were
the sights and the sounds that came bearing down before the wind, some few
weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.  It was a Nantucket ship, the
Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last cask of oil, and bolted down her
bursting hatches; and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though
somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing round among the widely-separated ships on
the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home.  The three men at her
mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at their hats; from the
stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down; and hanging captive from the

     bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the last whale they had slain.
Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colors were flying from her rigging, on
every side.  Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two
barrels of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender
breakers of the
same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.  As was
afterwards learned, the bachelor had met with the most surprising success;
all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas numerous
other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single fish.  Not only
had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room for the far more
valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had been bartered for,
from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along the deck, and in the
captain's and officers' staterooms.  Even the cabin table itself had been
knocked into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of
an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece.  In the forecastle,
the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them;
it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest
boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and
filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and
filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the
captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into,
in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.  As this glad ship of
good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian sound of enormous
drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men
were seen standing round her huge try-pots, which, covered with the
parchment-like poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar
to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew.  On the quarter-deck, the
mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped
with them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat,
firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island
negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the
hilarious jig.  Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy
at the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed.
You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastile, such
wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled
into the sea.
Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship's
elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before him,

     and seemed merely contrived for his own individual diversion.  And Ahab, he
too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with a stubborn
gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other's wakes --one all jubilations
for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to come --their two
captains in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene.

     Come aboard, come aboard!  cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting a
glass and a bottle in the air.  Hast seen the White Whale?  gritted Ahab in
reply.  No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all, said the
other good-humoredly.  Come aboard!  Thou are too damned jolly.  Sail on.
Hast lost any men?  Not enough to speak of --two islanders, that's all; --but
come aboard, old hearty, come along.  I'll soon take that black from your
brow.  Come along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and
homeward-bound.  How wondrous familiar is a fool!  muttered Ahab; then
aloud, Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayest; well, then,
call me an empty ship, and outward-bound.  So go thy ways, and I will mine.
Forward there!  Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!  And thus, while the
one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against
it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of the Pequod looking with
grave, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor's
men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in.  And as
Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homeward-bound craft, he took from
his pocket a small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial,
seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was
filled with Nantucket soundings.

     Not seldom in this life, when, on the
right side, fortune's favorites sail close by us, we, though all adroop
before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging
sails fill out.  So seemed it with the Pequod.  For next day after
encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain; and one
of them by Ahab.  It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of

     the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky,
sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such
plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it
almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the
Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to
sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.  Soothed again, but only soothed to
deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently
watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat.  For that strange
spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying --the turning sunwards of the
head, and so expiring --that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid
evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.  He turns
and turns him to it, --how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering
and invoking brow, with his last dying motions.  He too worships fire; most
faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun! --Oh that these too-favoring eyes
should see these too-favoring sights.  Look!  here, far water-locked; beyond
all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where
to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the
billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine
upon the Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of
faith; but see!  no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it
heads some other way. -- Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned
bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these
unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to
me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm.

     Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round
again, without a lesson to me.  Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power!
Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet! --that one strivest, this one jettest all in

     vain!  In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon
all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again.  Yet
dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith.  All thy
unnamable imminglings, float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once
living things, exhaled as air, but water now.  Then hail, for ever hail, O
sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest.  Born of
earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye
billows are my foster-brothers!

     The four whales slain that evening
had died wide apart; one, far to windward; one, less distant, to leeward;
one ahead; one astern.  These last three were brought alongside ere
nightfall; but the windward one could not be reached till morning; and the
boat that had killed it lay by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab's.
The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole; and the
lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the
black, glossy back, and far out upon the
midnight waves, which gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf
upon a beach.  Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who
crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round
the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails.  A sound like
the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah,
ran shuddering through the air.  Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to
face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed
the last men in a flooded world.  I have dreamed it again, said he.  Of the
hearses?  Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be
thine?  And who are hearsed that die on the sea?  But I said, old man, that
ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee
on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the
last one must be grown in America.  Aye, aye!  a strange sight that, Parsee:
--a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the
pall-bearers.  Ha!  Such a sight we shall not soon see.  Believe it or not,
thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.  And what was that saying about
thyself?  Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy
pilot.  And when thou art so gone before --if that ever befall --then ere I
can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still? --Was it not so?

     Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot!  I have here two pledges
that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.  Take another pledge, old
man, said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom,
-- Hemp only can kill thee.  The gallows, ye mean. --I am immortal then, on
land and on sea, cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision; -- Immortal on land
and on sea!  Both were silent again, as one man.  The grey dawn came on, and
the slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead whale
was brought to the ship.


     The season for the Line at length drew
near; and every day when Ahab, coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft,
the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager
mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes
centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the
ship's prow for the equator.  In good time the order came.  It was hard upon
high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about
taking his wonted daily obervation of the sun to determine his latitude.  Now,
in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences.
That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy
ocean's immeasureable burning-glass.  The sky looks lacquered; clouds there
are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is
as the insufferable splendors of God's throne.  Well that Ahab's quadrant
was furnished with colored glasses, through which to take sight of that solar
fire.  So, swinging his seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his
astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture
for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its
precise meridian.  Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee

     was kneeling beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like
Ahab's, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half
hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly
passionlessness.  At length the desired observation was taken; and with his
pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at
that precise instant.  Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked
up towards the sun and murmured to himself: Thou sea-mark!  thou high and
mighty Pilot!  thou tellest me truly
where I am --but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be?  Or canst
thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living?  Where is
Moby Dick?  This instant thou must be eyeing him.  These eyes of mine look
into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that
is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of
thee, thou sun!  Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the
other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and
muttered: Foolish toy!  babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and
Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might;

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

     Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest
fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure.
Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba
knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.  So, too, it is, that in
these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all
storms, the Typhoon.  It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky,
like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.  Towards evening of that
day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled was left to fight a
Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead.  When darkness came on, sky and
sea roared and split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that
showed the disabled masts fluttering here and there with
the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for its after sport.
Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every
flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster might
have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were
directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats.  But
all their pains seemed naught.  Though lifted to the very top of the cranes,
the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape.  A great rolling sea,
dashing high up against the reeling ship's high tetering side, stove in the
boat's bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a
sieve.  Bad work, bad work!  Mr. Starbuck, said Stubb, regarding the wreck,

     but the sea will have its way.  Stubb, for one, can't fight it.  You see, Mr.
Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round the
world it runs, and then comes the spring!  But as for me, all the start I
have to meet it, is just across the deck here.  But never mind; it's all in
fun: so the old song says; --( sings.) Oh!  jolly is the gale, And a joker
is the whale, A' flourishin' his tail, -- Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty,
joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!  The scud all a flyin' That's his
flip only foamin'; When he stirs in the spicin', -- Such a funny, sporty,
gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!  Thunder splits the
ships, But he only smacks his lips, A tastin' of this flip, -- Such a funny,
sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!  Avast Stubb,
cried Starbuck, let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our
rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace.  But I am
not a brave man; never said i was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to
keep up my spirits.  And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there's no way
to stop my singing
in this world but to cut my throat.  And when that's done, ten to one I sing
ye the doxology for a wind-up.  Madman!  look through my eyes if thou hast
none of thine own.  What!  how can you see better of a dark night than
anybody else, never mind how foolish?  Here!  cried Starbuck, seizing
Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his hand towards the weather bow,

     markest thou not that the gale comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab

     is to run for Moby Dick?  the very course he swung to this day noon?  now
mark his boat there; where is that stove?  In the stern-sheets, man; where
he is wont to stand --his stand-point is stove, man!  Now jump overboard, and
sing away, if thou must!  I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?

     Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,
soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's question.  The gale that
now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that will
drive us towards home.  Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but
to leeward, homeward --I see it lightens up there; but not with the
lightning.  At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness,
following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same
instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.  Who's there?  Old
Thunder!  said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole;
but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire.
Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the
perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships
carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water.  But as this
conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all
contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there, it
would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with some
of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel's way in the water;
because of all this, the lower parts of a ship's
lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made in long
slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the chains
outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.  The rods!
the rods!  cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to vigilance by
the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to light Ahab to his
post.  Are they overboard?  drop them over, fore and aft.  Quick!  Avast!
cried Ahab; let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker side.  Yet
I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that all the world
may be secured; but out on privileges!  Let them be, sir.  Look aloft!
cried Starbuck.  The corpusants!  the corpusants!  All the yard-arms were
tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end
with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently
burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an
altar.  Blast the boat!  let it go!  cried Stubb at this instant, as a
swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale
violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing.  Blast it! --but
slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
immediately shifting his tone, he cried -- The corpusants have mercy on us
all!  To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance
of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses
from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teter over to a seething sea; but
in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God's burning
finger has been laid on the ship; when his mene, mene, Tekel Upharsin has
been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.  While this pallidness was burning
aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick
cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale
phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars.  Relieved against
the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his
real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come.
The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely
gleamed as if they too
had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light,
Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body.  The tableau
all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the Pequod and
every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall.  A moment or two passed, when
Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one.  It was Stubb.  What
thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same in the song.

     No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope
they will, still.  But do they only have mercy on long faces? --have they no
bowels for a laugh?  And look ye, Mr. Starbuck --but it's too dark to look.
Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck;
for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with
sperm-oil, d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts,
like sap in a tree.  Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti
candles --that's the good promise we saw.  At that moment Starbuck caught
sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning to glimmer into sight.  Glancing
upwards, he cried: See!  see!  and once more the high tapering flames were
beheld with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.  The
corpusants have mercy on us all, cried Stubb, again.  At the base of the
mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the parsee was kneeling
in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near by, from
the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged securing

     a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered
together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping,
orchard twig.  In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or
stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the
deck; but all their eyes upcast.  Aye, aye, men!  cried Ahab.  Look up at
it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale!
Hand me those main-mast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let
mine beat against it; blood against fire!  So.
Then turning --the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon
the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood
erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.  Oh!  thou clear spirit
of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the
sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now
know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is
defiance.  To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate
thou canst but kill; and all are killed.  No fearless fool now fronts thee.
I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake
life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me.  In the midst
of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.  Though but a
point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly
live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights.  But
war is pain, and hate is woe.  Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will
kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and
though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here
that still remains indifferent.  Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou
madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.
[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to
thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his
right hand pressed hard upon them.] I own thy speechless, placeless power;
said I not so?  Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links.
Thou canst blind; but I can then grope.  Thou canst consume; but I can then
be ashes.  Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands.  I would
not take it.  The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and
ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning
ground.  Oh, oh!  Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.  Light though thou
be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light,
leaping out of thee!  The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not?  There burn
the flames!  Oh, thou magnanimous!  now do I glory in my genealogy.  But thou
art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not.  Oh, cruel!  what hast

thou done with her?  There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.  Thou knowest
not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy
beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun.  I know that of me, which thou
knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent.  There is some unsuffusing thing
beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all
thy creativeness mechanical.  Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched
eyes do dimly see it.  Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou
too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief.  Here again with
haughty agony, i read my sire.  leap!  leap up, and lick the sky!  I leap
with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I
worship thee!  The boat!  the boat!  cried Starbuck, look at thy boat, old

     man!  Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed
in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat's bow;
but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to
drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of
pale, forked fire.  As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent's
tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm -- God, God is against thee, old
man; forbear!  t'is an ill voyage!  ill begun, ill continued; let me square
the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to
go on a better voyage than this.  Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken
crew instantly ran to the braces --though not a sail was left aloft.  For the
moment all the aghast mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half
mutinous cry.  But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and
snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them;
swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope's
end.  Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart
that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke: -- All
your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul,
and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound.  And that ye may know to what
tune this heart beats;
look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!  And with one blast of his
breath he extinguished the flame.  As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain,
men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and
strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a
mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of ahab's many of the mariners
did run from him in a terror of dismay.

    
Ahab standing by the helm.  Starbuck approaching him.  We must send down the
main-top-sail yard, sir.  The band is working loose, and the lee lift is
half-stranded.  Shall I strike it, sir?  Strike nothing; lash it.  If I had
sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up now.  Sir? --in God's name! --sir?  Well.

     The anchors are working, sir.  Shall I get them inboard?  Strike nothing,
and stir nothing, but lash everything.  The wind rises, but it has not got
up to my table-lands yet.  Quick, and see to it. --By masts and keels!  he
takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting smack.  Send down my
main-top-sail yard!  Ho, gluepots!  Loftiest trucks were made for wildest
winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud.  Shall I
strike that?  Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest
time.  What a hooroosh aloft there!  I would e'en take it for sublime, did I
not know that the colic is a noisy malady.  Oh, take medicine, take
medicine!

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

     Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly!  This is
a nasty night, lad.

     The
Main-top-sail yard. --Tashtego passing new lashings around it.  Um, um, um.
Stop that thunder!  Plenty too much thunder up here.  What's the use of
thunder?  Um, um, um.  We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass
of rum.  Um, um, um!

     During the most violent shocks of the
Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's jaw-bone tiller had several times been
reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer
tackles had been attached to it --for they were slack -- because some play to
the tiller was indispensable.  In a severe gale like this, while the ship is
but a tossed shuttle-cock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see
the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round.  It was thus

     with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to
notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a
sight that hardly any one can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb --one engaged forward and the other
aft --the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut
adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers
of
an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed
bird is on the wing.  The three corresponding new sails were now bent and
reefed, and a storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went
through the water with some precision again; and the course --for the present,
East-south-east --which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more given
to the helmsman.  For during the violence of the gale, he had only steered
according to its vicissitudes.  But as he was now bringing the ship as near
her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo!  a good sign!
the wind seemed coming round astern; aye!  the foul breeze became fair!
Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of Ho!  the fair

     wind!  oh-he-yo, cheerly, men!  the crew singing for joy, that so
promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding
it.  In compliance with the standing order of his commander -- to report
immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change in
the affairs of the deck, --Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the
breeze --however reluctantly and gloomily, --than he mechanically went below to
apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.  Ere knocking at his state-room, he
involuntarily paused before it a moment.  The cabin lamp --taking long swings
this way and that --was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the
old man's bolted door, --a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of
upper panels.  The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain
humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of
the elements.  The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as
they stood upright against the forward bulkhead.  Starbuck was an honest,
upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw the
muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its
neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for
itself.  He would have shot me once, he murmured, yes, there's the very
musket that he pointed at me; --that one with the studded stock; let me touch
it --lift it.  Strange, that I, who have
handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now.  Loaded?
I must see.  Aye, aye; and powder in the pan; -- that's not good.  Best spill
it? --wait.  I'll cure myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly while I
think. --I come to report a fair wind to him.  But how fair?  Fair for death
and doom, -- that's fair for Moby Dick.  It's a fair wind that's only fair for
that accursed fish. --The very tube he pointed at me! --the very one; this one
--I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.
--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew.  Does he not say he will not strike
his spars to any gale?  Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant?  and in these
same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the
error-abounding log?  and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he
would have no lightning-rods?  But shall this crazed old man be tamely
suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him? --Yes, it would
make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any
deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab

     have his way.  If, then, he were this instant--put aside, that crime would
not be his.  Ha!  is he muttering in his sleep?  Yes, just there, --in there,
he's sleeping.  Sleeping?  aye, but still alive, and soon awake again.  I
can't withstand thee, then, old man.  Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not
entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest.  Flat obedience to thy
own flat commands, this is all thou breathest.  Aye, and say'st the men
have vow'd thy vow; say'st all of us are Ahabs.  Great God forbid! -- But is
there no other way?  no lawful way? --Make him a prisoner to be taken home?
What!  hope to wrest this old man's living power from his own living hands?
Only a fool would try it.  Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with
ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would
be more hideous than a caged tiger, then.  I could not endure the sight;
could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable
reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage.  What, then, remains?
The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest.  I stand
alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between
me and law. --Aye, aye, 'tis so. --Is heaven a murderer
when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets
and skin together? --And would I be a murderer, then, if --and slowly,
stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket's end
against the door.  On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head
this way.  A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child
again. --Oh Mary!  Mary! --boy!  boy!  boy! --But if I wake thee not to death, old
man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week may
sink, with all the crew!  Great God, where art thou?  Shall I?  shall I? --The
wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed
and set; she heads her course.  Stern all!  Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart
at last!  Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's
tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream to
speak.  The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;

     Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.  He's too sound
asleep, Mr Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him.  I must see to
the deck here.  Thou know'st what to say.

     Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea
rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's
gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread.  The strong,
unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying
sails; the whole world boomed before the wind.  Muffled in the full morning
light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;

     where his bayonet
rays moved on in stacks.  Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and
queens, reigned over everything.  The sea was as a crucible of molten gold,
that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.  Long maintaining an enchanted
silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the tetering ship loweringly
pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced
ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and
saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with
his undeviating wake.  Ha, ha, my ship!  thou mightest well be taken now for
the sea-chariot of the sun.  Ho, ho!  all ye nations before my prow, I bring
the sun to ye!  Yoke on the further billows; hallo!  a tandem, I drive the
sea!  But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards
the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.  East-sou-east,
sir, said the frightened steersman.  Thou liest!  smiting him with his
clenched fist.  Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun
astern?  Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
blinding palpableness must have been the cause.  Thrusting his head half way
into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted
arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger.  Standing behind
him Starbuck looked, and lo!  the two compasses pointed East, and the
Pequod was as infallibly going West.  But ere the first wild alarm could get
out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, I have
it!  It has happened before.  Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our
compasses --that's all.  Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take
it.  Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir, said the pale
mate, gloomily.  Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in
more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms.  The
magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know,
essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be
much marvelled at, that such things should be.  In instances where the
lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the
spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more
fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before
magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle.  But in
either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue
thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same
fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost
one inserted into the kelson.  Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and
eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his
extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that
the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's
course to be changed accordingly.  The yards were hard up; and once more the
Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed
fair one had only been juggling her.  Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret
thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders;

     while Stubb and Flask --who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing
his feelings --likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced.  As for the men, though some
of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of
Fate.  But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly
unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into
their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.  For a space the old man walked
the deck in rolling reveries.  But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he
saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before
dashed to the deck.  Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot!  yesterday

     I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would feign have wrecked me.  So,
so.  But Ahab is lord over the level load-stone
yet.  Mr. Starbuck--a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of
the sail-maker's needles.  Quick!  Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse
dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives,
whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of
his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses.

     Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though
clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious
sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.  Men, said he,
steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had
demanded, my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this
bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any.
Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was
said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow.  But
Starbuck looked away.  With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel

     head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining,
bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck.  Then, with the
maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the
blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that,
several times, the mate still holding the rod as before.  Then going through
some small strange motions with it --whether indispensable to the magnetizing
of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain
--he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two
reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its
middle, over one of the compass-cards.  At first, the steel went round and
round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its
place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped
frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it,
exclaimed, --Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level
loadstone!  The sun is East, and that compass swears it!  One after another
they peered in, for nothing but their own
eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they
slunk away.  In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all
his fatal pride.

     While now the fated Pequod had been
so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use.

     Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's
place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising,
wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently more
for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary
slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of
progression every hour.  It had been thus with the Pequod.  The wooden reel
and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of
the after bulwarks.  Rains and spray had damped it; the sun and wind had
warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly.
But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance
upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how
his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log
and line.  The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in
riots.  Forward, there!  Heave the log!  Two seamen came.  The golden-hued
Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman.  Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave.
They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the deck,
with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy,
sidelong-rushing sea.  The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by
the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool
of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab
advanced to him.  Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty

     or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the
old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
speak.  Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet
have spoiled it. 'Twill hold, old gentleman.  Long heat and wet, have they
spoiled thee?  Thou seem'st to hold.  Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not
thou it.  I hold the spool, sir.  But just as my captain says.  With these
grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a
superior, who'll ne'er confess.  What's that?  There now's a patched
professor in Queen Nature's granite-founded College; but methinks he's too
subservient.  Where wert thou born?  In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.

     Excellent!  Thou'st hit the world by that.  I know not, sir, but I was born
there.  In the Isle of Man, hey?  Well, the other way, it's good.  Here's a
man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;
which is sucked in --by what?  Up with the reel!  The dead, blind wall butts
all inquiring heads at last.  Up with it!  So.  The log was heaved.  The
loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and
then, instantly, the reel began to whirl.  In turn, jerkingly raised and
lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the
old reelman to stagger strangely.  Hold hard!  Snap!  the overstrained line
sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was gone.  I crush the
quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the
log-line.  But Ahab can mend all.  Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman.
And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line.  See

     to it.

     There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer seems
loosening out of the middle of the world.  Haul in, haul in, Tahitian!  These
lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow.  Ha,
Pip?  come to help; eh, Pip?  Pip?  whom call ye Pip?  Pip jumped from the
whale-boat.  pip's missing.  let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here,
fisherman.  It drags hard; I guess he's holding on.  Jerk him, Tahiti!  Jerk
him off; we haul in no cowards here.  Ho!  there's his arm just breaking
water.  A hatchet!  a hatchet!  cut it off -- we haul in no cowards here.
Captain Ahab!  sir, sir!  here's Pip, trying to get on board again.  Peace,
thou crazy loon, cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.  Away from the
quarter-deck!  The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser, muttered Ahab,
advancing.  Hands off from that holiness!  Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?

     Astern there, sir, astern!  Lo, lo!  And who art thou, boy?  I see not my
reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes.  Oh God!  that man should be a
thing for immortal souls to sieve through!  Who art thou, boy?  Bell-boy,
sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding!  Pip!  Pip!  Pip!  One hundred pounds
of clay reward for Pip; five feet high-- looks cowardly --quickest known by
that!  Ding, dong, ding!  Who's seen Pip the coward?  There can be no hearts
above the snow-line.  Oh, ye frozen heavens!  look down here.  Ye did beget
this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines.  Here,
boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives.  Thou
touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my
heart-strings.  Come, let's down.  What's this?  here's velvet shark-skin,
intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it.  Ah, now, had poor Pip but
felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost!  This seems to
me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by.  Oh, sir, let
old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the
white, for I will not let this go.

     Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors
than are here.  come, then, to my cabin.  Lo!  ye believers in gods all
goodness, and in man all ill, lo you!  see the omniscient gods oblivious of
suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet
full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.  Come!  I feel prouder leading

     thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's!  There go two
daft ones now, muttered the old Manxman.  One daft with strength, the other
daft with weakness.  But here's the end of the rotten line --all dripping, too.

     Mend it, eh?  I think we had best have a new line altogether.  I'll see Mr.
Stubb about it.

     Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's
levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and
line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator.  Making so long a
passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long,
sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild;
all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate
scene.  At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of
the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch --then headed by
Flask --was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly --like
half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered Innocents
--that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of
some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the
carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing.  The
Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered;
but the pagan harpooneers remained
unappalled.  Yet the grey Manxman --the oldest mariner of all -- declared that
the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned
men in the sea.  below in his hammock, ahab did not hear of this till grey
dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings.  He hollowly laughed, and thus
explained the wonder.  Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort
of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams,
or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept
company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail.  But this
only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very
superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones

     when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and
semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside.  In
the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken
for men.  But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most
plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning.  At
sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and
whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors
sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the man,
there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at
his perch, when a cry was heard --a cry and a rushing --and looking up, they
saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of
white bubbles in the blue of the sea.  The life-buoy --a long slender cask --was
dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring;
but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask
it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled
at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the
bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.  And
thus the first man of the pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the
White Whale, on the White Whale's own
peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep.  But few, perhaps,
thought of that at the time.  Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at
this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a
foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already
presaged.  They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks
they had heard the night before.  But again the old Manxman said nay.  The
lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it;
but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish
eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were
impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end,
whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going to leave the
ship's stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and
inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin.  A life-buoy of a
coffin!  cried Starbuck, starting.  Rather queer, that, I should say, said
Stubb.  It will make a good enough one, said Flask, the carpenter here can
arrange it easily.  Bring it up; there's nothing else for it, said
Starbuck, after a melancholy pause.  Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me
so -- the coffin, I mean.  Dost thou hear me?  Rig it.  And shall I nail down
the lid, sir?  moving his hand as with a hammer.  aye.  And shall I caulk
the seams, sir?  moving his hand as with a caulking-iron.  Aye.  And shall
I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?  moving his hand as with a
pitch-pot.  Away!  What possesses thee to this?  Make a life-buoy of the
coffin, and no more. --Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.  He goes
off in a huff.  The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks.  Now I don't
like this.  i make a leg for captain ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman;
but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he wont put his head into it.  Are
all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin?  And now I'm ordered to make
a life-buoy of it.  It's like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on
the other side now.  I don't like this cobbling sort of business --I don't like
it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place.  Let tinkers' brats do
tinkerings; we are their betters.  I like to take in hand none but clean,
virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins
at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at
the conclusion; not a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at
the beginning at the end.  It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling
jobs.  Lord!  what an affection all old women have for tinkers.  I know an old

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

     The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between
the vice-bench and the open hatchway; the Carpenter calking its seams; the
string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the
bosom of his frock. --Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip
following him.  Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently.  He goes!  Not
this hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy. -- Middle aisle
of a church!  What's here?  Life buoy, sir.  Mr. Starbuck's orders.  Oh,
look, sir!  Beware the hatchway!  Thank ye, man.  Thy coffin lies handy to
the vault.  Sir?  The hatchway?  oh!  So it does, sir, so it does.  Art
not thou the leg-maker?  Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?  I
believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?  Well enough.  But art
thou not also the undertaker?  Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a
coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something
else.  Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, inter-meddling,
monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next
day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same
coffins?  Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
jack-of-all-trades.  But I do not mean anything, sir.  I do as I do.  The
gods again.  hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin?  The
Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes;

     and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand.  Dost thou never?

     Sing, sir?  Do I sing?  Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the
reason why the grave-digger made music must
have been because there was none in his spade, sir.  But the calking mallet is
full of it.  Hark to it.  Aye, and that's because the lid there's a
sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this
--there's naught beneath.  And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty
much the same, Carpenter.  Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the
coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in?  Faith, sir, I've--

     Faith?  What's that?  Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like
--that's all, sir.  Um, um; go on.  I was about to say, sir, that-- Art
thou a silk-worm?  Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?  Look at thy
bosom!  Despatch!  and get these traps out of sight.  He goes aft.  That was
sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes.  I've heard that the
Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the
middle.  Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his
middle.  He's always under the Line--fiery hot, I tell ye!  He's looking this
way --come, oakum; quick.  Here we go again.  This wooden mallet is the cork,
and I'm the professor of musical glasses --tap, tap! ( Ahab to himself.)

     There's a sight!  There's sound!  The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the
hollow tree!  Blind and dumb might well be envied now.  See!  that thing rests
on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines.  A most malicious wag, that fellow.
Rat-tat!  So man's seconds tick!  Oh!  how immaterial are all materials!  What

     things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?  Here now's the very
dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the
help and hope of most endangered life.  A life-buoy of a coffin!  Does it go
further?  Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but
an immortality-preserver!  I'll think of that.  But no.  So far gone
am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one,
seems but uncertain twilight to me.  Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with
that accursed sound?  I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return
again.  Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous
philosophies from thee!  Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must
empty into thee!

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

     and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her
boats; and though she had thus continued doing till day light; yet not the
least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.  The story told, the
stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the
Pequod.  He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search; by sailing
over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping
a double horizon, as it were.  I will wager something now, whispered Stubb
to Flask, that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best
coat; mayhap, his watch --he's so cursed anxious to get it back.  Who ever
heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after
one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season?  See, Flask, only
see how pale he looks --pale in the very buttons of his eyes --look --it wasn't
the coat --it must have been the-- My boy, my own boy is among them.  For
God's sake --I beg, I conjure --here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab,
who thus far had but icily received his petition.  For eight-and-forty hours
let me charter your ship --I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it
--if there be no other way --for eight-and-forty hours only --only that --you
must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.  His son!  cried Stubb,

     oh, it's his son he's lost!  I take back the coat and watch --what says Ahab?

     We must save that boy.  He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night, said
the old Manx sailor standing behind them; I heard; all of ye heard their
spirits.  Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the
Rachel's the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of
the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but among the
number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other hand,
separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had
been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged
to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved for him by
his chief mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship
in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided
boats, always to pick up the majority first.  But the captain, for some
unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not
till forced to it by Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy;
a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but
unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought
to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially
the destiny of all his race.  Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket
captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted
three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their
first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance
display
of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness
and concern.  Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of
Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but
without the least quivering of his own.  I will not go, said the stranger,

     till you say aye to me.  Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like
case.  For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab --though but a child, and nestling
safely at home now --a child of your old age too -- Yes, yes, you relent; I
see it --run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.  Avast,
cried Ahab -- touch not a rope-yarn; then in a voice that prolongingly
moulded every word -- Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.  Even now I lose
time.  Good bye, good bye.  God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself,
but I must go.  Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three
minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward
again, and let the ship sail as before.  Hurriedly turning, with averted face,

     he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this
unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit.  But starting from
his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than
stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship.  Soon the two ships diverged
their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw
hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea.  This way
and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to
tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it;
while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as
three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.  But by
her still halting course and winding, woful way, you plainly saw that this
ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort.  She was
Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.

     (Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches
him by the hand to follow.) Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab
now.  The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would
not have thee by him.  There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too
curing to my malady.  Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes
my most desired health.  Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve
thee, as if thou wert the captain.  Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own
screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.  No, no, no!  ye have not
a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread
upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.  Oh!  spite of
million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man! --and
a black!  and crazy! --but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he
grows so sane again.  They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor
little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his
living skin.  But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him.  Sir, I must
go with ye.  If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up
in him.  I tell thee no; it cannot be.  Oh good master, master, master!

     Weep so, and I will murder thee!  have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know
that I am there.  And now I quit thee.  Thy hand! --Met!  True art thou, lad,
as the circumference to its centre.  So: God for ever bless thee; and if it
come to that, -- God for ever save thee, let what will befall.

     Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.) Here he this instant stood;
I stand in his air, --but I'm alone.  Now were even poor Pip here I could
endure it, but he's missing.  Pip!  Pip!  Ding, dong, ding!  Who's seen Pip?
He must be up here; let's try the door.  What?  neither lock, nor bolt, nor
bar; and yet there's no opening it.  It must be the spell; he told me to
stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine.  Here, then, I'll
seat me, against the transom, in the ship's full middle, all her keel and
her three masts before me.  Here, our old sailors say, in their black
seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows
of captains and lieutenants.  Ha!  what's this?  epaulets!  epaulets!  the
epaulets all come crowding!  Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill
up, monsieurs!  What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy's host to white men
with gold lace upon their coats! --Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip? --a little
negro lad, five feet high,  hang-dog look, and cowardly!  Jumped from a
whale-boat once; --seen him?  No!  Well then, fill up again, captains, and
let's drink shame upon all cowards!  I name no names.  Shame upon them!  Put
one foot upon the table.  Shame upon all cowards. --Hist!  above there, I hear
ivory --Oh, master, master!  I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me.

     But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge
through; and oysters come to join me.

     And now that at the proper time and place,
after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab, --all other whaling waters
swept --seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more
securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
longitude where his tormenting wound
had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day
preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick; --and now that all his successive
meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac
indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or
sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's
eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see.  As the
unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night
sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly
gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew.  It domineered
above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain
to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.  In
this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished.
Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one.
Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and
powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of ahab's iron soul.  like
machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old
man's despot eye was on them.  But did you deeply scan him in his more secret
confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you
would have seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable
Parsee's glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times
affected it.  Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin
Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked
dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a
mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some
unseen being's body.  And that shadow was always hovering there.  For not by
night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below.
He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but
wondrous eyes did plainly say --We two watchmen never rest.  Nor, at any time,
by night or day could the mariners now step up the deck, unless Ahab was
before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks
between two
undeviating limits, --the main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him
standing in the cabin-scuttle, --his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if
to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless
he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung
in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell
unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or
whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so
in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp
gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat.  The clothes
that the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him; and so,
day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks;
whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.  He ate in the same
open air; that is, his two only meals, -- breakfast and dinner: supper he
never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as
unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base,
though perished in the upper verdure.  But though his whole life was now
become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's mystic watch was without
intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak --one man to the
other --unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it
necessary.  Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain;
openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder.  If by day
they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as
concerned the slightest verbal interchange.  At times, for longest hours,
without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his
scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each
other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the
Parsee his abandoned substance.  And yet, somehow, did Ahab --in his own proper
self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his
subordinates, --Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave.
Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen
tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib.  For be this Parsee
what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.  At the first faintest
glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft -- Man the
mast-heads! --and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight,
the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman's bell, was heard
-- What d'ye see? --sharp!  sharp!  But when three or four days had slided by,
after meeting the children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen;
the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at least,
of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether
Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought.  But if
these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.  I will have
the first sight of the whale myself, --he said.  Aye!  Ahab must have the
doubloon!  and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and
sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the
main-mast head, he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope; and
attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to
fasten it at the rail.  This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing
beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the
other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning

     Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,
-- Take the rope, sir --I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.  Then arranging
his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his
perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards
stood near it.  And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab
gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles, --ahead, astern, this side, and
that, --within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.  When
in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging,
which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that
spot, and sustained there by
the rope; under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given
in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it.  Because in
such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft
cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck;
and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down
from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with
a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the
crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea.  So Ahab's proceedings
in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to
be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose
him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision --one of
those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;
--it was strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman;

     freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's
hands.  Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a
maze of untrackably swift circlings.  Then it darted a thousand feet straight
up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his
head.  But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it
much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful
eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.  Your
hat, your hat, sir!  suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at
the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than
his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.  But already the sable
wing was before the old man's eyes; the long hooked bill at his head: with a
scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
an eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace it,
and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome.

     But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good.  Ahab's
hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in
advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that
disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast
height into the sea.

     The intense Pequod
sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-coffin still
lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was
descried.  As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams,
called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the
height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or
disabled boats.  Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white
ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but
you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.  Hast seen the White
Whale?  Look!  replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and
with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.  Hast killed him?  The harpoon is
not yet forged that will ever do that, answered the other, sadly glancing
upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless
sailors were busy in sewing together.  Not forged!  and snatching Perth's
levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming -- Look ye,
Nantucketer;
here in this hand I hold his death!  Tempered in blood, and tempered by
lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot
place behind the fin, where the white whale most feels his accursed life!

     Then God keep thee, old man --see'st thou that --pointing to the hammock -- I
bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead
ere night.  Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died;
you sail upon their tomb.  Then turning to his crew -- Are ye ready there?
place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then -- Oh!  God
--advancing towards the hammock with uplifted hands -- may the resurrection and
the life-- Brace forward!  Up helm!  cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of
the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick,
indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with
their ghostly baptism.  As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the
strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.

     Ha!  yonder!  look yonder, men!  cried a foreboding voice in her wake.  In
vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail
to show us your coffin!

     It was a clear steel-blue day.  The
firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure;
only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look,
and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,
as Samson's chest in his sleep.
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to
and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty
leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled,
murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.  But though thus contrasting within,

     the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one;
it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.  Aloft, like a royal
czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling
sea; even as bride to groom.  And at the girdling line of the horizon, a
soft and tremulous motion --most seen here at the equator --denoted the fond,
throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom
away.  Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of
ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his
splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.  Oh,
immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!  Invisible winged creatures
that frolic all round us!  Sweet childhood of air and sky!  how oblivious were
ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe!  But so have I seen little Miriam and
Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire;
sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that
burnt-out crater of his brain.  Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle,
Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and
sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the
profundity.  But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to
dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.  That glad, happy air,
that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world,
so long cruel -- forbidding --now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however
wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her
heart to save and to bless.  From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear
into the sea; nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one wee
drop.  Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the
side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing
that stole out of the centre of the serenity around.  Careful not to touch
him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.  Ahab
turned.  Starbuck!  Sir.  Oh, Starbuck!  it is a mild, mild wind, and a
mild looking sky.  On such a day --very much such a sweetness as this --I
struck my first whale --a boy-harpooneer of eighteen!  Forty-- forty--forty years
ago! --ago!  Forty years of continual whaling!  forty years of privation, and
peril, and storm-time!  forty years on the pitiless sea!  for forty years has
Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
of the deep!  Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent

     three ashore.  When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of
solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness,
which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without
--oh, weariness!  heaviness!  Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! --when
I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before
--and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare -- fit emblem of the
dry nourishment of my soul --when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to
his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts --away,

     whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and
sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage
pillow --wife?  wife? --rather a widow with her husband alive!  Aye, I widowed
that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the
frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand
lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey --more a demon
than a man! --aye, aye!  what a forty years' fool --fool --old fool, has old
Ahab been!  Why this strife of the chase?  why weary,
and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance?  how the richer or
better is Ahab now?  Behold.  Oh, Starbuck!  is it not hard, that with this
weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me?
Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.  Locks
so grey did never grow but from out some ashes!  But do I look very old, so
very, very old, Starbuck?  I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though
I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.  God!
God!  God! --crack my heart!-- stave my brain! --mockery!  mockery!  bitter,
biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem
and feel thus intolerably old?  Close!  stand close to me, Starbuck; let me
look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better
than to gaze upon God.  By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone!  this
is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.  No, no;
stay on board, on board! --lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase

     to Moby Dick.  That hazard shall not be thine.  No, no!  not with the far
away home I see in that eye!  Oh, my Captain!  my Captain!  noble soul!
grand old heart, after all!  why should any one give chase to that hated fish!

     Away with me!  let us fly these deadly waters!  let us home!  Wife and child,
too, are Starbuck's --wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow
youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing,
paternal old age!  Away!  let us away! --this instant let me alter the course!
How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to
see old Nantucket again!  I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days,
even as this, in nantucket.  they have, they have.  I have seen them --some
summer days in the morning.  About this time --yes, it is his noon nap now --
the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me,
of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to
dance him again.  Tis my Mary, my Mary herself!  She promised that my boy,
every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of
his father's sail!  Yes, yes!  no more!  it is done!  we head for Nantucket!
Come, my Captain, study out the course,
and let us away!  See, see!  the boy's face from the window!  the boy's hand
on the hill!  But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he
shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.  What is it, what
nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and
master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural
lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on
all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural
heart, I durst not so much as dare?  Is Ahab, Ahab?  Is it I, God, or who,
that lifts this arm?  But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an
errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible

     power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think
thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this
world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.  And all the time,
lo!  that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!  Look!  see yon Albicore!  who
put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish?  Where do murderers go,
man!  Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?  But it is
a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it
blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the
slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the
new-mown hay.  Sleeping?  Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the
field.  Sleep?  Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung
down, and left in the half-cut swaths --Starbuck!  But blanched to a
corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.  Ahab crossed the deck
to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in
the water there.  Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.

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

     To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long
ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.  And did none of ye see
it before?  cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him.  I saw him
almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out, said
Tashtego.  Not the same instant; not the same --no, the doubloon is mine,
Fate reserved the doubloon for me.  I only; none of ye could have raised the
White Whale first.  There she blows!  there she blows! --there she blows!
There again! --there again!  he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic
tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets.  He's
going to sound!  In stunsails!  Down top-gallant-sails!  Stand by three
boats.  Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship.  Helm
there!  Luff, luff a point!  So; steady, man, steady!  There go flukes!  No,
no; only black water!  All ready the boats there?  Stand by, stand by!
Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower, --quick, quicker!  and he slid through
the air to the deck.  He is heading straight to leeward, sir, cried Stubb,

     right away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet.  Be dumb, man!  Stand
by the braces!  Hard down the helm! --brace up!  Shiver her! --shiver her!  So;
well that!  Boats, boats!  Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped;
all the boat-sails set --all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness,
shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset.  A pale, death-glimmer
lit up Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.  Like
noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only
slowly they neared the foe.  As they neared him, the ocean grew still more
smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so
serenely it spread.  At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his
seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly
visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually
set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam.  He saw the vast,
involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond.  Before it, far out
on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his
broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade;
and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley
of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his
side.  But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl
softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to
some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but
shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back; and
at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro
skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this
pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.  A gentle joyousness --a
mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale.  Not the
white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful

     horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth
bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not
Jove, not that great majesty Supreme!  did surpass the glorified White Whale
as he so divinely swam.  On each soft side --coincident with the parted swell,
that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away --on each bright side,
the whale shed off enticings.  No wonder there had been some among the hunters
who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to
assail it; but had fatally
found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes.  Yet calm, enticing calm,
oh, whale!  thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no
matter how many in that same way thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed
before.  And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea,
among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged
trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.  But soon the
fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole
marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and
warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed
himself, sounded, and went out of sight.  Hoveringly halting, and dipping on
the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool that
he left.  With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails
adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's
reappearance.  An hour, said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern;
and he gazed beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide
wooing vacancies to leeward.  It was only an instant; for again his eyes
seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle.  The breeze
now freshened; the sea began to swell.  The birds! --the birds!  cried
Tashtego.  In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds
were now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few yards began
fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
expectant cries.  Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover no
sign in the sea.  But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with
wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and
then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening
teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.  It was Moby Dick's open
mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the
blue of the sea.  The glittering mouth yawned beneath
the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one side-long sweep with
his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous
apparition.  Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went
forward to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to
grasp their oars and stand by to stern.  Now, by reason of this timely
spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to
face the whale's head while yet under water.  But as if perceiving this
strategem, moby dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him,
sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his
pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.  Through and through; through every
plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on
his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its
bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw
curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock.
The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of
Ahab's head, and reached higher than that.  In this attitude the White Whale
now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse.  With unastonished

     eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were
tumbling over each other's heads to gain the uttermost stern.  And now, while
both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with
the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged
beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were
almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily
paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that
monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which
placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with
all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to
wrench it from its gripe.  As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped
from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws,
like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in
twain, and locked themselves fast again in
the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.  These floated aside, the
broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales,
and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across.  At that preluding
moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to perceive the whale's
intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his
hold for the time; at that moment his hand had made one final effort to push
the boat out of the bite.  But only slipping further into the whale's mouth,
and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on
the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell
flat-faced upon the sea.  Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now
lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and
down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled
body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose --some twenty or more feet
out of the water --the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray still
higher into the air.  So, in a gale, the but half-baffled Channel billows only
recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit
with their scud.  But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam
swiftly round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his
vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly
assault.  The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood
of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of
Maccabees.  Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent
tail, and too much of a cripple to swim, --though he could still keep afloat,
even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen,

     like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst.  From the
boat's fragmentary
stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the
other drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them
to look to themselves.  For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's
aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that
he seemed horizontally swooping upon them.  And though the other boats,
unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to
strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of the
jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves
hope to escape.  With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge
of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head.
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's mast
heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was
now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her; -- Sail on the --but that
moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the
time.  But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering
crest, he shouted, -- Sail on the whale! --Drive him off!  The Pequod's
prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually
parted the white whale from his victim.  As he sullenly swam off, the boats
flew to the rescue.  Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes,
the white brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily
strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a
time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under
foot of herds of elephants.  Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as
desolate sounds from out ravines.  But this intensity of his physical
prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it.  In an instant's compass,
great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those
shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives.  And so, such
hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it,
in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of
instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble
natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

     The harpoon, said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one
bended arm -- is it safe?  Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it, said
Stubb, showing it.  Lay it before me; --any missing men?  One, two, three,
four, five; --there were five oars, sir, and here are five men.  That's
good. --Help me, man; I wish to stand.  So, so, I see him!  there!  there!
going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!  Hands off from me!  The eternal
sap runs up in Ahab's bones again!  Set the sail; out oars; the helm!  It
is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by
another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued
with what is called double-banked oars.  It was thus now.  But the added power
of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have

     treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed,
that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an
indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for
so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a
thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude.  The ship itself,
then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means
of overtaking the chase.  Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were
soon swayed up to their cranes --the two parts of the wrecked boat having been
previously secured by her --and then hoisting everything to her side, and
stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails,
like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the
leeward wake of Moby Dick.  At the well known, methodic intervals, the
whale's glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads;
and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time,
and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second
of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard. -- Whose is the doubloon
now?  D'ye see him?  and if the reply was, No, sir!  straightway he
commanded them to lift him to his perch.  In this way the day wore on; Ahab,

now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.  As he was thus
walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid them
hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still greater breadth --thus
to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own
wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there
reversed; broken bow to shattered stern.  At last he paused before it; and
as in an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail
across, so over the old man's face there now stole some such added gloom as
this.  Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his
Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed -- The thistle
the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha!  ha!  What
soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck?  Man, man!  did I not know
thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a
poltroon.  Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.  Aye, sir, said
Starbuck drawing near, 'tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one.

     Omen?  omen? --the dictionary!  If the gods think to speak outright to man,
they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old
wives' darkling hint. --Begone!  Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing;
Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all
mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor
gods nor men his neighbors!  Cold, cold --I shiver! --How now?  Aloft there!
D'ye see him?  Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.  Soon,
it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.  Can't see
the spout now, sir; --too dark --cried a voice from the air.  How heading when
last seen?  As before, sir, --straight to leeward.  Good!  he will travel
slower now 'tis night.  Down royals and
top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck.  We must not run over him before
morning; he's making a passage now, and may heave-to a while.  Helm there!
keep her full before the wind! --Aloft!  come down! --Mr. Stubb, send a fresh
hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning. --Then advancing
towards the doubloon in the main-mast -- Men, this gold is mine, for I earned
it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then,
whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold
is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times
its sum shall be divided among all of ye!  Away now! --the deck is thine, sir.

     And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching
his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to
see how the night wore on.
This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale.  It receives its designation
(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise
of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
described.  By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view
whatever objects may be encircling him.

     At day-break, the three
mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.  D'ye see him?  cried Ahab, after
allowing a little space for the light to spread.  see nothing, sir.  Turn
up all hands and make sail!  he travels faster than I thought for; --the
top-gallant sails! --aye, they should have been kept on her all night.  But no
matter --'tis but resting for the rush.  Here be it said, that this
pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into
night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in
the South sea fishery.  For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of
experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses
among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale
when last descried, they will,
under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the
direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight,
as well as his probable rate of progression during that period.  And, in these
cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose
general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to
again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass,
and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the
more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be
visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after
being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight,
then, when night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the
darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
pilot's coast is to him.  So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the
proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired
purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land.  And as the mighty iron
Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace,
that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a
baby's pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will
reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there
are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,
according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many
hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about
reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude.  But to render this
acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the
whaleman's allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound
mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a
quarter from his port?  Inferable from these statements, are many
collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.  The ship tore on;
leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a
plough-share and turns up the level field.  By salt and hemp!  cried Stubb,

     but this swift motion of the deck creeps up one's legs and tingles at the
heart.  This
ship and I are two brave fellows! --Ha!  ha!  Some one take me up, and launch
me, spine-wise, on the sea, --for by live-oaks!  my spine's a keel.  Ha, ha!
we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!  There she blows --she blows! --she
blows! --right ahead!  was now the mast-head cry.  Aye, aye!  cried Stubb.

     I knew it --ye can't escape --blow on and split your spout, O whale!  the mad
fiend himself is after ye!  blow your trump --blister your lungs! --Ahab will
dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his water-gate upon the stream!  And
Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew.  The frenzies of the
chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew.
Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before;
these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab,
but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares
that scatter before the bounding bison.  The hand of Fate had snatched all
their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the
past night's suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which
their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things,
their hearts were bowled along.  The wind that made great bellies of their
sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this
seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty.  For as the one ship that held them all;
though it was put together of all contrasting things --oak, and maple, and pine
wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp --yet all these ran into each other in the one
concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long
central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's
valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded
into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one
lord and keel did point to.  The rigging lived.  The mast-heads, like the tops
of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs.  Clinging to a
spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings;
others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat
far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals,
ready and ripe for their fate.  Ah!  how they still strove through that
infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!  Why sing ye
not out for him, if ye see him?  cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some
minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.  Sway me up, men; ye
have been deceived; not moby dick casts one odd jet that way, and then
disappears.  It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had
mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon
proved; for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed
to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made
the air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles.  The triumphant
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as --much nearer to the ship than
the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead --Moby Dick bodily
burst into view!  For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the
peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now
reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching.
Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale
thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a
mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and
more.  In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his
mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.  There she
breaches!  there she breaches!  was the cry, as in his immeasureable
bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven.  So suddenly
seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer
margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably
glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and
fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an
advancing shower in a vale.  Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!
cried Ahab, thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand! --Down!  down all of ye,
but one man at the fore.  The boats! --stand by!
Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting
stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated back-stays and halyards; while
Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.  Lower
away, he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat --a spare one, rigged the
afternoon previous.  Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine --keep away from the
boats, but keep near them.  Lower, all!  As if to strike a quick terror into
them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned,
and was now coming for the three crews.  Ahab's boat was central; and
cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head, --that
is, pull straight up to his forehead, --a not uncommon thing; for when within
a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale's
sidelong vision.  But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all
three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale
churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were,
rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered
appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from
every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which
those boats were made.  But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like
trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though, at
times, but by a plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's unearthly slogan
tore every other cry but his to shreds.  But at last in his untraceable
evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways
entangled the slack of the three lines now fast to him, that they
foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the
planted irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew aside a little,
as if to rally for a more tremendous charge.  Seizing that opportunity, Ahab
first paid out more line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it
again --hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls --when lo! --a sight
more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!  Caught and twisted
--corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons and lances, with all
their bristling barbs and
points, came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's
boat.  Only one thing could be done.  Seizing the boat-knife, he critically
reached within --through --and then, without --the rays of steel; dragged in
the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice
sundering the rope near the chocks --dropped the intercepted fagot of steel
into the sea; and was all fast again.  That instant, the White Whale made
a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing,
irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his
flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach,
and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in
which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and
round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.  While the
two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving
line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope little Flask
bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape
the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one
to ladle him up; and while the old man's line --now parting -- admitted of his
pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could; --in that wild
simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils, --Ahab's yet unstricken boat
seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires, --as, arrow-like, shooting
perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead
against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till
it fell again --gunwale downwards --and Ahab and his men struggled out from
under it, like seals from a seaside cave.  The first uprising momentum of the
whale --modifying its direction as he struck the surface --involuntarily
launched him along it, to a little distance from the centre of the
destruction he had made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment
slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar,
bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail
swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea.  But soon, as if
satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated
forehead through the
ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward
way at a traveller's methodic pace.  As before, the attentive ship having
descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping
a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars and whatever else could
be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks.  Some sprained shoulders,
wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances;
inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were
there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one.  As
with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his
boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so
exhaust him as the previous day's mishap.  But when he was helped to the deck,
all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead of standing by himself he still
half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost
to assist him.  His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short
sharp splinter.  Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the
leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.  The
ferrule has not stood, sir, said the carpenter, now coming up; I put good
work into that leg.  But no bones broken, sir, I hope, said Stubb with true
concern.  Aye!  and all splintered to pieces, Stubb! --d'ye see it. -- But
even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone
of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost.  Nor white whale,
nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
inaccessible being.  Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder
roof? -- Aloft there!  which way?  Dead to leeward, sir.  Up helm, then;
pile on the sail again, ship keepers!  down the rest of the spare boats and
rig them --Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat's crews.  Let me first help
thee towards the bulwarks, sir.  Oh, oh, oh!  how this splinter gores me now!

     Accursed fate!
that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!

     Sir?  My body, man, not thee.  Give me something for a cane -- there, that
shivered lance will do.  Muster the men.  Surely I have not seen him yet.  By
heaven it cannot be! --missing? -- quick!  call them all.  The old man's hinted
thought was true.  Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there.

     The Parsee!  cried Stubb -- he must have been caught in-- The black vomit
wrench thee! --run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle --find him --not gone
--not gone!  But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee
was nowhere to be found.  Aye, sir, said Stubb -- caught among the tangles of
your line --I thought I saw him dragging under.  My line!  my line?  Gone?
--gone?  What means that little word? --What death-knell rings in it, that old
Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.  The harpoon, too! --toss over the litter

     there, --d'ye see it? --the forged iron, men, the white whale's -- no, no, no,
--blistered fool; this hand did dart it! --'tis in the fish! --Aloft there!
keep him nailed --quick! --all hands to the rigging of the boats --collect the
oars --harpooneers!  the irons, the irons! -- hoist the royals higher --a pull
on all the sheets! --helm there!  steady, steady for your life!  I'll ten
times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but
I'll slay him yet!  Great God!  but for one single instant show thyself,
cried Starbuck; never, never wilt thou capture him, old man --In Jesus' name
no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness.  Two days chased; twice
stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy
evil shadow gone --all good angels mobbing thee with warnings: --what more
wouldst thou have? --Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps
the last man?  Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea?  Shall we
be towed by him to the infernal world?  Oh, oh, -- Impiety and blasphemy to
hunt him more!  Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever
since that hour we both saw --thou know'st what, in one another's
eyes.  But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the
palm of this hand --a lipless, unfeatured blank.  Ahab is for ever Ahab, man.
This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
years before this ocean rolled.  Fool!  I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act
under orders.  Look thou, underling!  that thou obeyest mine. --Stand round
me, men.  Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered
lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab --his body's part; but Ahab's
soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs.  I feel strained, half
stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so.
But ere I break, ye'll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that
Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet.  Believe ye, men, in the things called
omens?  Then laugh aloud, and cry encore!  For ere they drown, drowning things
will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore.  So
with Moby Dick --two days he's floated --to-morrow will be the third.  Aye, men,
he'll rise once more, --but only to spout his last!  D'ye feel brave men,
brave?  As fearless fire, cried Stubb.  And as mechanical, muttered Ahab.
Then as the men went forward, he muttered on: -- The things called omens!
And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken
boat.  Oh!  how valiantly I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's
clinched so fast in mine! --The Parsee --the Parsee! -- gone, gone?  and he
was to go before: --but still was to be seen again ere I could perish --How's
that? --There's a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts
of the whole line of judges: --like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain.  I'll,

     I'll solve it, though!  When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight
to leeward.  So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed
nearly as on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of
the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns
in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their
fresh weapons for the morrow.  Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab's wrecked

     craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as on the
night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his hid,
heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due eastward
for the earliest sun.
THE CHASE--THIRD DAY The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and
once more the solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds
of the daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.

     D'ye see him?  cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.  In his
infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all.  Helm there;
steady, as thou goest, and hast been going.  What a lovely day again; were it
a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this
morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn
upon that world.  Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab
never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for
mortal man!  to think's audacity.  God only has that right and privilege.
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts
throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.  And yet, I've sometimes
thought my brain was very calm --frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like
a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it.  And still this
hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no,
it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the
earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava.  How the wild winds blow
it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed
ship they cling to.  A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through
prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them,
and now comes blowing hither as innocent as
fleeces.  Out upon it! --it's tainted.  Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on
such a wicked, miserable world.  I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink
there.  And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind!  who ever
conquered it?  In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow.  Run tilting
at it, and you but run through it.  Ha!  a coward wind that strikes stark
naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.  Even Ahab is a braver

     thing --a nobler thing that that.  Would now the wind but had a body; but
all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things
are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents.  There's a most
special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!  And yet, I say
again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in
the wind.  These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow
straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from
their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and
mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where
to go at last.  And by the eternal Poles!  these same Trades that so directly
blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them --something so
unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along!  To it!  Aloft
there!  What d'ye see?  Nothing, sir.  Nothing!  and noon at hand!  The
doubloon goes a-begging!  See the sun!  Aye, aye, it must be so.  I've
oversailed him.  How, got the start?  Aye, he's chasing me now; not I, him
--that's bad; I might have known it, too.  Fool!  the lines --the harpoons
he's towing.  Aye, aye, I have run him by last night.  About!  about!  Come
down, all of ye, but the regular look outs!  Man the braces!  Steering as
she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's quarter, so that
now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon
the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake.  Against the
wind he now steers for the open jaw, murmured Starbuck to himself, as he
coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail.  God keep us, but already my
bones feel
damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh.  I misdoubt me that I
disobey my God in obeying him!  Stand by to sway me up!  cried Ahab,
advancing to the hempen basket.  We should meet him soon.  Aye, aye, sir,
and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once more Ahab swung on high.

     a whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages.  time itself now held long
breaths with keen suspense.  But at last, some three points off the weather
bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads
three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.  Forehead to
forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick!  On deck there! --brace
sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye.  He's too far off to lower yet,
Mr. Starbuck.  The sails shake!  Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul!
So, so; he travels fast, and I must down.  But let me have one more good
round look aloft here at the sea; there's time for that.  An old, old sight,

     and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it,

     a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket!  The same! --the same! --the same to
Noah as to me.  There's a soft shower to leeward.  Such lovely leewardings!
They must lead somewhere --to something else than common land, more palmy than
the palms.  Leeward!  the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then;
the better if the bitterer quarter.  But good bye, good bye, old mast-head!
What's this? -- green?  aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks.  No such green

     weather stains on Ahab's head!  There's the difference now between man's old
age and matter's.  But aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in
our hulls, though, are we not, my ship?  Aye, minus a leg, that's all.  By
heaven this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way.  I can't
compare with it; and I've known some ships made of dead trees outlast the
lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers.  What's that he
said?  he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again?  But
where?  Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those
endless stairs?  and all night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did
sink to.  Aye,
aye, like many more thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee;

     but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short.  Good by, mast-head --keep a good eye
upon the whale, the while I'm gone.  We'll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night,
when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail.  He gave the
word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven
blue air to the deck.  In due time the boats were lowered, but as standing in
his shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he
waved to the mate, --who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck --and bade him
pause.  Starbuck!  Sir?  For the third time my soul's ship starts upon
this voyage, Starbuck.  Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.  Some ships sail
from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!  Truth, sir:
saddest truth.  Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the
full of the flood; --and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb,
Starbuck.  I am old; --shake hands with me, man.  Their hands met; their eyes
fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.  Oh, my captain, my captain! --noble
heart --go not --go not! -- see, it's a brave man that weeps; how great the
agony of the persuasion then!  Lower away! --cried Ahab, tossing the mate's
arm from him.  Stand by the crew!  In an instant the boat was pulling round
close under the stern.  The sharks!  the sharks!  cried a voice from the low
cabin-window there; O master, my master, come back!  But Ahab heard
nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the
hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped
in the water; and in this
way accompanied the boat with their bites.  It is a thing not uncommonly
happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times
apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over
the banners of marching regiments in the east.  But these were the first
sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been
first descried; and whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such
tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses
of the sharks --a matter sometimes well known to affect them, --however it was,
they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.  Heart of
wrought steel!  murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with
his eyes the receding boat -- canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?
--lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed
to the chase; and this the critical third day? --For when three days flow
together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning,

     the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing --be
that end what it may.  Oh!  my God!  what is this that shoots through me, and
leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant, --fixed at the top of a shudder!
Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the
past is somehow grown dim.  Mary, girl!  thou fadest in pale glories behind
me; boy!  I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue.  Strangest problems
of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between --Is my journey's end coming?
My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day.  Feel thy heart,
--beats it yet? --Stir thyself, Starbuck! --stave it off-- move, move!  speak
aloud! --Mast-head there!  See ye my boy's hand on the hill? --Crazed; --aloft
there! --keep thy keenest eye upon the boats: --mark well the whale! --Ho!
again! --drive off that hawk!  see!  he pecks --he tears the vane --pointing to
the red flag flying at the main-truck -- Ha!  he soars away with it! -- Where's
the old man now?  sees't thou that sight, oh Ahab! -- shudder, shudder!  The
boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads --a downward
pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near
him at the next rising, he
held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew
maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and
hammered against the opposing bow.  Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves!
to their uttermost heads, drive them in!  ye but strike a thing without a
lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine: --and hemp only can kill me!
Ha!  ha!  Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles;
then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice,
swiftly rising to the surface.  A low rumbling sound was heard; a
subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but
obliquely from the sea.  Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it
hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into
the deep.  Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant
like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving
the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the
whale.  Give way!  cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward
to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him,
Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.

     The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead,
beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came
churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart;
spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in
one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a
scar.  While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as
the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up.  Lashed round and
round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during
the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him,

     the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to
shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand.  Befooled, befooled! --drawing in a long
lean breath -- Aye, Parsee!  I see thee again. --Aye, and thou goest before;
and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise.  But I hold thee

     to the last letter of thy word.  Where is the second hearse?  Away, mates, to
the ship!  those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and
return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die --Down, men!  the first thing
that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon.  Ye
are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me. --Where's the
whale?  gone down again?  But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent
upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the
last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now
again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship, --which thus
far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present
her headway had been stopped.  He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity,
and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.  Oh!
Ahab, cried Starbuck, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to
desist.  See!  Moby Dick seeks thee not.  It is thou, thou, that madly
seekest him!  Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly
impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas.  And at last when Ahab was
sliding by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as
he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow
him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval.  Glancing upwards, he saw
Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads;
while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been
hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them.  One after
the other, through the portholes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses
of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and
lances.  As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats;
far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart.  But he rallied.  And
now marking that the vane or
flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just
gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and
nails, and so nail it to the mast.  Whether fagged by the three days' running
chase, and the resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or
whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was
true, the White Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat
so rapidly nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not
been so long a one as before.  And still as Ahab glided over the waves the
unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat;
and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and
crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip.  Heed
them not!  those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars.  Pull on! 'tis the
better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding water.  But at every bite,
sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!  They will last long enough!
pull on! --But who can tell --he muttered -- whether these sharks swim to feast
on the whale or on ahab? --But pull on!  Aye, all alive, now --we near him.  The

     helm!  take the helm; let me pass, --and so saying, two of the oarsmen
helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.  At length as the
craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale's
flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance --as the whale sometimes
will --and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off
from the whale's spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even
thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise
high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer
curse into the hated whale.  As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as
if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled
his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so
suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of
the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed
into the sea.
As it was, three of the oarsmen --who foreknew not the precise instant of the
dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects -- these were flung out;
but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and
rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard
again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and
swimming.  Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea.
But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and
hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the
boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain
and tug, it snapped in the empty air!  What breaks in me?  Some sinew cracks!
--'tis whole again; oars!  oars!  Burst in upon him!  Hearing the tremendous
rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank
forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black
hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions;
bethinking it --it may be --a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down
upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.  Ahab
staggered; his hand smote his forehead.  I grow blind; hands!  stretch out
before me that I may yet grope my way.  Is't night?  The whale!  The ship!
cried the cringing oarsmen.  Oars!  oars Slope downwards to thy depths, O
sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time
upon his mark; I see: the ship!  the ship!  Dash on, my men!  Will ye not
save my ship?  But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst
through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly
level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop
the gap and bale out the pouring water.  Meantime, for that one beholding
instant, Tashtego's mast-head hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the
red
flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out
from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb,
standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster
just as soon as he.  The whale, the whale!  Up helm, up helm!  Oh, all ye
sweet powers of air, now hug me close!  Let not Starbuck die, if die he
must, in a woman's fainting fit.  Up helm, I say --ye fools, the jaw!  the
jaw!  Is this the end of all my bursting prayers?  all my life-long fidelities?

     Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work.  Steady!  helmsman, steady.  Nay, nay!  Up
helm again!  He turns to meet us!  Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards
one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart.  My God, stand by me now!

     Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help
Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here.  I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!
Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking eye?
And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft; would it
were stuffed with brushwood!  I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!  Look ye,
sun, moon, and stars!  I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted
up his ghost.  For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but
hand the cup!  Oh, oh!  oh, oh!  thou grinning whale, but there'll be plenty
of gulping soon!  Why fly ye not, O Ahab!  For me, off shoes and jacket to
it; let Stubb die in his drawers!  A most mouldy and over salted death,
though; --cherries!  cherries!  cherries!  Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we
die!  Cherries?  I only wish that we were where they grow.  Oh, Stubb, I
hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now
come to her, for the voyage is up.  From the ship's bows, nearly all the
seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons,
mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their
various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which
from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad
band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.  Retribution,

     swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all
that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead
smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.  Some fell flat
upon their faces.  Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft
shook on their bull-like necks.  Through the breach, they heard the waters
pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.  The ship!  The hearse! --the second
hearse!  cried ahab from the boat; its wood could only be American!
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel;
but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the
other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time, he lay
quiescent.  I turn my body from the sun.  What ho, Tashtego!  Let me hear thy
hammer.  Oh!  ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and
only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed
prow, --death-glorious ship!  must ye then perish, and without me?  Am I cut
off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains?  Oh, lonely
death on lonely life!  Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost
grief.  Ho, ho!  from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold
billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death!

     Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last
I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I
spit my last breath at thee.  Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common
pool!  and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!  Thus, I give up the
spear!  The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with
igniting velocity the line ran through the groove; --ran foul.  Ahab stooped to
clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck,
and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of
the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.  Next instant, the heavy eye-splice
in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an
oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.  For an instant,
the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned.  The ship?  Great God,
where is the ship?  Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her
sidelong fading phantom,

as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water;
while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches,

     the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea.
And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew,
and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and
inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of
the Pequod out of sight.  But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured
themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few
inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of
the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the
destroying billows they almost touched; --at that instant, a red arm and a
hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the

     flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.  A sky-hawk that tauntingly
had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars,
pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced
to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and

     simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath,
in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven,
with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his
whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship,
which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part
of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.  Now small fowls flew
screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its
steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as
it rolled five thousand years ago.
