Moby Dick: Or, The Whale ................................................................................................................................1

Herman Melville......................................................................................................................................1

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

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs

commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown

is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous

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 pierheads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the

rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in

lath and plaster tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green

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

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

agoing, 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 hillside blue. But though the picture lies thus

tranced, and though this pinetree 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 kneedeep 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;

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 seasick 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 shipboard 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

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 masthead. 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 tarpot, 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

What of it, if some old hunks of a seacaptain 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 seacaptains 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

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

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 quarterdeck 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

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

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

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great floodgates of the wonderworld

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

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpetbag, 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

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 RedMen, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from

Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones

so goes the story to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a

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 dubiouslooking, 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

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 'SwordFish 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

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 ashbox 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

SwordFish?' this, then, must needs be the sign of 'The Trap'. However, I picked myself up and hearing a

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

povertystricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of

It was a queer sort of place a gableended 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 indoors,

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 blackletter, 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 corncob 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

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

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going awhaling, 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 gableended SpouterInn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old

fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very

large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which

you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the

neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. such unaccountable masses of

shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New

England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation,

and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry,

you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something

hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A

boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of

indefinite, halfattained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took

an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas,

deceptive idea would dart you through. It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. It's the unnatural combat

of the four primal elements. It's a blasted heath. It's a Hyperborean winter scene. It's the breaking

up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in

the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint

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 CapeHorner in a great

hurricane; the halffoundered 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 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 sickleshaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the newmown

grass by a longarmed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and

savage could ever have gone a deathharvesting 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

Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon lowarched way cut through what in old times must have

been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round you enter the public room. A still duskier place is

this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost

fancy you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner anchored old

ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelflike 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 darklooking 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

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without within, the

villainous 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

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',

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

'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 jackknife, 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

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

'Oh, no,' said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, 'the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never

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

Supper over, the company went back to the barroom, when, knowing not what else to do with myself, I

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

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 pitchlike 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 liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed

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 seagods had ordained that he should soon become

my shipmate (though but a sleepingpartner 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

cofferdam. 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!

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

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

'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 planeiron 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

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

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

'Landlord!' said I, 'what sort of a chap is he does he always keep such late hours?' It was now hard upon

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 tonight he went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on

'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

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

'I tell you what it is, landlord,' said I, quite calmly, 'you'd better stop spinning that yarn to me I'm not

'May be not,' taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, 'but I rayther guess you'll be done brown if that ere

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

'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,

'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 tonight, cause tomorrow'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?

'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 tonight; 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

'There,' said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did double duty as a washstand

and centre table; 'there, make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye.' I turned round from eyeing the

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

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 bedside, 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

Whether that mattress was stuffed with corncobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a

good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly made a

good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light

Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal headpeddler. 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 stickingplasters 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 sealskin 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

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the second floor back. I am no

coward, but what to make of this headpeddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension.

Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, i confess

i was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead

of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a

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

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 fireboard, 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 fireplace 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

singsong 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 W..

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

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

'Whoe debel you?' he at last said 'you no speake, damme, I kille.' And so saying the lighted

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

'Speake! tellee me whoee be, or dam me, I kille!' 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

'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

This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me to get into bed rolling

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 particolored 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

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 sunlit room was now

wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and

nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane,

and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated

by my 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 horsecollar; 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 hatchetfaced 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 pikestaff, 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

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

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 washstand centretable,

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

I quickly followed suit, and descending into the barroom 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

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 barroom 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

You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a

suntoasted 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 selfpossessed 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

seadogs, 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;

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

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 tomahawkpipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with

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

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 lastmentioned 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

But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatabooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the

wild specimens of the whalingcraft 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 whalelance. 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 swallowtailed coat, girdled with a

sailorbelt and sheathknife. Here comes another with a sou'wester and a bombazine cloak.

No townbred dandy will compare with a countrybred one I mean a downright bumpkin dandy a

fellow that, in the dogdays, 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

whalefishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his

seaoutfit, he orders bellbuttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor HaySeed! how

bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down

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 springtime do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all

America will you find more patricianlike houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.

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

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 horsechestnuts, candelabrawise, proffer the passerby 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

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

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, 1986. This Tablet Is erected to his Memory By his Sister. Sacred To the Memory of

SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats' crews of the Ship Eliza Who were towed out of sight by a

Whale, On the Offshore Ground in the Pacific, December 31st, 1839. This Marble Is here placed by their

Sacred To the Memory of The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by

al. Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3rd, 1833. This Tablet Is erected to his Memory by His

Shaking off the sleet from my iceglazed 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

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

blackbordered 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

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

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

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

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

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 manropes 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 manropes, 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 maintop of his vessel.

The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with swinging ones, were of clothcovered

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,

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

But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, borrowed from the chaplain's former

seafarings. 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 darkrolling 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 seataste 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

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

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 seaboots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's

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

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

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

'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;

seaweed 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, hardheartedness, 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

'With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks

that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of

this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks,

perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the

modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by

water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an

almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the

Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that,

just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from

God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye,

skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So

disordered, selfcondemning 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 hatbox, valise, or carpetbag, 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

'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 stateroom, Sir," says Jonah now. "I'm travelweary; 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 stateroom ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and

Jonah gasps. then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's waterline, 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

'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,

'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

'Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the Godfugitive 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

'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 shootsto 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

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 seastorm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep

chest heaved as with a groundswell; 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

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 masthead 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 pilotprophet, 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 seashells, 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!

'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

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

maintruck 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, topgallant 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

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained

Returning to the SpouterInn 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 jackknife 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 longdrawn

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.

Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, halfpretending 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

selfcollectedness 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

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

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

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

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

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,

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 daybreak was yet some way down the future.

Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by

little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the

headboard with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our

kneepans were warmingpans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors;

indeed out of bedclothes 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 selfcreated darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the

unilluminated twelveo'clockatnight, 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,

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

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map;

When a newhatched 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

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,

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

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

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

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

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor carpetbag, 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

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

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 fingerglass. 'Now,' said Queequeg, 'what you tink now, Didn't our

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 worldwandering 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

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

At the same foamfountain, 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 lubberlike 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 midsomerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his

'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

'He say,' said I, 'that you came near kille that man there,' pointing to the still shivering greenhorn.

'Kille,' cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of disdain, 'ah! him bevy

'Look you,' roared the Captain, 'I'll kille you, you cannibal, if you try any more of your tricks aboard here;

But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his own eye. The prodigious strain

upon the mainsail had parted the weathersheet, 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;

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, jointstock world, in all meridians. We

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

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 redmen. 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, saltsea Mastodon, clothed

with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their anthill 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

SpouterInn 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 potluck 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

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears, swung from the crosstrees of an

old topmast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the crosstrees were sawed off on the other

side, so that this old topmast 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

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 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 clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?' says I; 'but that's a rather cold and

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

'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

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 chowderheaded people? 'But look,

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 fishbones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clamshells.

Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in

superior old sharkskin. 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,

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 tomorrow for breakfast, men?'

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 whalingfleet 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

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

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 threeyears' voyages The DevilDam the Tit bit, and the Pequod.

Devildam, I do not know the origin of; Titbit 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 DevilDam; from her, hopped over to the Titbit; and, finally, going on board the Pequod, looked

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know; squaredtoed luggers;

mountainous Japanese junks; butterbox 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 clawfooted look about her. Long seasoned and weatherstained 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 pilgrimworshipped flagstone 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 chiefmate, 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

chiefmateship, 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 ThorkillHake'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 seaivory. 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

Now when I looked about the quarterdeck, 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 mainmast. 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 rightwhale. 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 topknot 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

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 oldfashioned 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

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 pilotcloth, cut in the Quaker style; only

there was a fine and almost microscopic network 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

'Supposing it be the Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?' he demanded.

'Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou are no Nantucketer ever been in a stove boat?'

'Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I've been several voyages in the merchant service, and I

'Marchant 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

'But what takes thee awhaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping ye.'

'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

'Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest

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

'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

'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

'Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat, and then jump after it?

'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

'Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go awhaling, 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 weatherbow, 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

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the

floodtide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly

'Not much,' I replied 'nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I

'Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of

I was a little staggered, but go awhaling 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

'And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,' he added ' come along with ye.' And so saying, he led

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

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 whalehunters.

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

seaking, 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

nightwatches 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

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a welltodo, 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 straightbodied 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 cabinboy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shadbellied

waistcoat; from that becoming boatheader, chiefmate, and captain, and finally a shipowner; Bildad, as I

hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of

sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his wellearned income.

Now Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his seagoing

days, a bitter, hard taskmaster. 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

hardhearted 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 chiefmate, to have his

drabcolored eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something

a hammer or a marlingspike, 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,

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 broadbrim 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

'Bildad,' cried Captain Peleg,' at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying those Scriptures, now, for the

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'll do,' said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book in a mumbling tone quite

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

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

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 jackknife, 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 seventyseventh wouldn't be too much,

Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and seventyseventh! 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 seventyseven 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

seventyseventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventyseven gold doubloons;

'Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,' cried Peleg, 'Thou dost not want to swindle this young man! he must have

'Seven hundred and seventyseventh,' again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling

'I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,' said Peleg, 'do ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth

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 seventyseventh 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

'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 allfired outrage to tell

any human creature that he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start my

soulbolts, but I'll I'll yes, I'll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye

As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for

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 jackknife 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 tomorrow?'

'What lay does he want?' groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in which he had again been burying

'Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,' said Peleg. 'Has he ever whaled it any?' turning to me.

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 whaleship 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,

'And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right enough; thou art shipped.'

'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, godlike 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 goodbye 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

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 nightfall; 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

toadstool; 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

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 halfcrazy 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

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 keyhole: 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 keyhole; but the door opening into an odd corner of the

room, the keyhole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the footboard 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

Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustardpot in one hand and a vinegarcruet 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 emptyhanded, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustardpot and vinegarcruet, and the entire

'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 vinegarcruet, 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

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 sidepocket, '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

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 selfcollected; 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

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

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

I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long stories of some sailors who had just

come from a plumpudding voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whalingvoyage in a schooner or brig,

confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after listening to these plumpuddingers 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

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

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

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 hamsquattings 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 halfstarved. 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 appledumpling; and

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

'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

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,

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

'What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?' said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my comrade

'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

'Why,' said I, 'he's a member of the First Congregational Church.' Here be it said, that many tattooed savages

'First Congregational Church,' cried Bildad, 'what! that worships in Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's

meetinghouse?' 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

'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

'Do tell, now,' cried Bildad, 'is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting? I never

'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

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 foremast 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 whaleboat? 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 whaleboats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon,

'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,

'Now,' said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, 'sposee him whalee 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

So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled among the same ship's

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

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 broadskirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one entitled 'The Latter Day Coming; or

No Time to Lose,' placed it in queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his, looked

earnestly into his eyes, and said, 'Son of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship,

and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I

beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from

the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!'

Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language, heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and

'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 boatheader 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 afterclaps 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

'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 jurymasts how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.'

Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we followed him. There he stood, very

quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were mending a topsail 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.

Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the water, for the moment each

occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,

levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and

patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent smallpox had in all

directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing

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

'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.

'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.'

'He's got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps,' abruptly said the

'Queequeg,' said I, 'let's go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he's talking about something and

'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.

'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.'

'They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that he's a good whalehunter, and a good

'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;

'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.'

With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggarlike 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

'Look here, friend,' said I, 'if you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to

'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

'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

'Morning it is,' said I. 'Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will

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, halfhinting,

halfrevealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and

halfapprehensions, 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

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

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 lookout 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 nightfall.

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,

Every one knows what a multitude of things beds, saucepans, knives and forks, shovels and tongs,

napkins, nutcrackers, and what not, are indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling,

which necessitates a threeyears' 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

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

But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last day, with a

long oilladle 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

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

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

'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,

'Yes, we are,' said I, 'but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little

'No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that,' said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with

'Elijah,' said I, 'you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific

But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said 'Did ye see anything

Struck by this plain matteroffact question, I answered, saying, 'Yes, I thought I did see four or five men;

Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder again, said, 'See

'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 peajacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face downwards

'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.

'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

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 gardenchairs which are convertible into walkingsticks; upon occasion, a

chief calling his attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps in

While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk from me, he flourished the

He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawkpipe, 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

'Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails today. The Captain came aboard last night.'

I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a noise on deck.

'Holloa! Starbuck's astir,' said the rigger. 'He's a lively chief mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive

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

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 everthoughtful Charity had come off in a whaleboat, with her last gift a

nightcap for Stubb, the second mate, her brotherinlaw, 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,

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 quarterdeck, 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

'Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,' he cried, as the sailors lingered at the mainmast. 'Mr. Starbuck, drive 'em

'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

'Man the capstan! Blood and thunder! jump!' was the next command, and the crew sprang for the

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 pilotfee 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 seventyseventh 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

'Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?' he roared. 'Spring, thou sheephead; 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

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

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

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

At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sailboat that had

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 goodbye 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 faroff 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

But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him, 'Captain Bildad come, old

shipmate, we must go. Back the mainyard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now!

Careful, careful! come, Bildad, boy say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck luck to ye, Mr. Stubb

luck to ye, Mr. Flask goodbye, and good luck to ye all and this day three years I'll have a hot supper

'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

sailneedles 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. Goodbye, goodbye! Don't keep that

cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be careful with the butter twenty cents the

'Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering, away!' and with that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and

Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two

hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavyhearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

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

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 midwinter 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 sixinch chapter is the stoneless grave of

Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the stormtossed 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 wormlike,

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 oceanperishing straight up,

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

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 whaleship 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 whaleship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battlefields

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

But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea,

an allabounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as

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

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 1750 and 1788 pay to

her whalemen in bounties upwards of �1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America

now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred

vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the

time of sailing, $20,000,000; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000.

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 whaleship

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 menofwar now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and

glory of the whaleship, 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

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

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the

whaleman. After its first blunderborn discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as

pestiferously barbarous; but the whaleship touched there. The whaleship 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 whaleship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.

The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whaleship,

that cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive

missionaries to their first destinations. If that doublebolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is

the whaleship 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 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 whalingvoyage? Who, but no

less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the

Norwegian whalehunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but

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

Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is declared 'a royal

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,

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

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 whaleship was my Yale College and my

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

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of

seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a

caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is

solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of

making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the

essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a

fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hairoil,

unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't

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 codliver 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 twicebaked 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 illlooking; 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 thousandfold 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 honesthearted men, restrain the

gush of daredevil 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

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 sundown; 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

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

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 stockcompanies 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 valorruined 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

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

Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a

CapeCod man. A happygolucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an

indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected

as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year. Good humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his

whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as

particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stagedriver is about the

snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very deathlock of the fight, he handled his unpitying

lance coolly and offhandedly, 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 goodhumor 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

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

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 waterrat,

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 KingPost 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,

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

And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied

by his boatsteerer 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

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

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 GayHeaders. 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

Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal black negrosavage, with a lionlike tread

an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them

ringbolts, and would talk of securing the topsail 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 chessman 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

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 quarterdeck 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

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 merchantship 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 seaofficers 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 quarterdeck.

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 rodlike 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 GayHead 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 seatraditions, 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 birthmark on him from

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 GayHead

Indian once; 'but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a

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 everpitching 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 mastereye. And not only that, but

moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing

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 pivothole, 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 redcheeked, dancing girls, April and May,

trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thundercloven old oak will at

least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such gladhearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a

little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a

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 rosewater 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

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 seacommanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the nightcloaked

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

So, almost every twentyfour 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 cabinscuttle; 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 quarterdeck; 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, lumberlike 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 cannonball, 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

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

'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

'I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,' muttered Stubb, as he found himself

descending the cabinscuttle. '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 powderpans! 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

twentyfour; and he don't sleep then. Didn't that DoughBoy, 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 TicDollyrow

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 DoughBoy 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

to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over

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

In old Norse times, the thrones of the sealoving 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

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

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.

'Such a queer dream, KingPost, 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 badgerhaired 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, oqq.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

garterknights 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,

'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

'Masthead, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts! If ye see a white one, split your lungs

'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

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

'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

'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,

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 RightWhale, 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 SpermWhale, and

which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats and whaleports; 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

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 SouthSea whaleships, 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

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

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary lettersorter in the Post office is equal to it. To grope down into the

bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of

the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this Leviathan! The awful

tauntings in Job might well appal me. 'Will he (the Leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope

of him is vain!' But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales

with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the

fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.

D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, 'I hereby separate the whales from the fish.' But of my own knowledge, I know

that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, were still

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

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:

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 upanddown tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly

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 groundplan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand divisions of the

First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into Chapters),

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

FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters: I. The Sperm Whale; II. the Right Whale;

III. the Fin Back Whale; IV. the Humpbacked Whale; V. the Razor Back Whale; VI. the Sulphur Bottom

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

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 (FinBack). Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various names

of FinBack, Tall Spout, and LongJohn, 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 packettracks. In

the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Finback resembles the Right Whale, but is of a less portly girth,

and a lighter color, approaching to olive. His great lips present a cablelike 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 hourlines graved on it. On that Ahazdial

the shadow often goes back. The FinBack is not gregarious. He seems a whalehater, as some men are

manhaters. 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 FinBack 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. Broadnosed whales and

beaked whales; pikeheaded whales; bunched whales; underjawed whales and rostrated whales, are the

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, backfin, 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

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

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 lighthearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and

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

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 ropewalks 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.

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 twentyfive 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

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 lefthanded 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 swordfish and

billfish; 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 icepiercer; 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 onesided 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 seaunicorn'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,

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopardlike look, being of a milkwhite 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

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

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

DUODECIMOES.These include the smaller whales. I, The Huzza Porpoise; II, The Algerine 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

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 Fourthof 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 wellfed, 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

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 RightWhale 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 gentlemanlike 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 mealymouth 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 mealbag. A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is

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, halffabulous

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 BottleNose Whale; the Junk Whale; the PuddingHeaded 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

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

Note: I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs (Pigfish and

Sowfish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these

pigfish 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. Note: 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 whalecraft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic

peculiarity on shipboard, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of

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 FatCutter; 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

whalehunting 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

Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this the first lives aft, the last

forward. Hence, in whaleships 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 quarterdeck 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 quarterdeck with an elated grandeur not

surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial

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 quarterdeck; 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

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

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 whalehunter

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

It is noon; and DoughBoy, the steward, thrusting his pale loafofbread face from the cabinscuttle,

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, medallionshaped 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,'

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

But the third emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarterdeck, 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 seausages, 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 dinnertable 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 shipmaster, then, by inference, you will derive the

Over his ivoryinlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sealion 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 oldfashioned 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 dinnertime, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin skylight,

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 carefree 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 DoughBoy was fain to

bring on a great baron of saltjunk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it,

if he did not go with a nimble hopskipandjump, 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

DoughBoy'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 breadfaced 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, DoughBoy's whole life was one continual lipquiver.

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

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 hearseplumed 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 DoughBoy 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 simplewitted 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 DoughBoy. 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 saltsea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fablemongering ears, all

their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.

But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived there; still, being anything but sedentary

in their habits, they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleepingtime, when they

In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains, who, as a set, rather incline

to the opinion that by rights the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody

else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might

more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it was something as

a streetdoor enters a house; turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a

permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship;

socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an

alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring

and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out

the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the

It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my first masthead came

In most American whalemen the mastheads 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 mastheads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysailpoles

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 mastheads, 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 mastheads 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 masthead 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 masthead standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief

among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a theory singularly

supported by the peculiar stairlike formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious

long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new

stars; even as the lookouts 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 standerofmastheads; 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 standersofmastheads 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 Vend�me, 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

mainmast 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 gunmetal, stands his masthead 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

It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the masthead standers of the land with those of the sea;

but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole historian of

Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere

ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty spars along the

seacoast, to which the lookouts 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 readymanned boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now become

obsolete; turn we then to the one proper masthead, that of a whaleship at sea. The three mastheads are

kept manned from sunrise 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 masthead; 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

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 masthead 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' gallantmast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks

(almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t' gallant crosstrees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner

feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your

house aloft with you, in the shape of a watchcoat; but properly speaking the thickest watchcoat 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 watchcoat 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

Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mastheads of a southern whale ship are unprovided

with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow'snests, in which the lookouts of a Greenland whaler

are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet,

entitled 'A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the

rediscovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;' in this admirable volume, all standers of

mastheads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow'snest

of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good craft. He called it the Sleet's crow'snest, 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'snest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished

with a movable sidescreen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of

the mast, you ascend into it through a little traphatch 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 masthead 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'snest; 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'snest, 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 brokendown 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

casebottle, 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 casebottle, 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

But if we Southern whalefishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen

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 topsail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery

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 thoughtengendering

altitude, how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders, 'Keep

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye shipowners 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 sunkeneyed 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 whalefishery 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 masthead of some luckless disappointed whaleship, and

in moody phrase ejaculates: 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubberhunters

sweep over thee in vain.' Very often do the captains of such ships take those absentminded young

philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient 'interest' in the voyage; halfhinting 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 shortsighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their operaglasses 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

opiumlike listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absentminded 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, halfseen,

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

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 midday, in the fairest weather, with one halfthrottled shriek you drop through

that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

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 cabingangway to the deck. There most sea captains usually walk at that hour, as

'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

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

mainmast 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

'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

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

augerhole 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 shipboard except in some extraordinary

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

halfslouched 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

'Good!' cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his

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

But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now halfrevolving in his pivothole, with one hand reaching

high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:

'All ye mastheaders 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

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

Receiving the topmaul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the mainmast 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 whiteheaded whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that

whiteheaded whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke look ye, whosoever of ye raises me

'Huzza! huzza!' cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the

It's a white whale,' I say, resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul; a white whale. 'Skin your eyes for

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

'Captain Ahab,' said Tashtego, 'that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.'

'Does he fantail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?' said the GayHeader deliberately.

'And has he a curious spout, too,' said Daggoo, 'very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain

'And he have one, two, tree oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,' cried Queequeg disjointedly,

'all twisketee betwisk, like him him ' faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and

'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 sheepshearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fantails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is

'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 heartstricken 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

'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

'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! 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 countinghouse 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

'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

'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 angerglow.

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 foremasthand 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

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

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;

'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 serpentsnapping 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

'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

'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

'In vain!' cried Ahab; 'but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three but once take the fullforced shock, then mine

own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead.

Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three

pagan kinsmen there yon three most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain

the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet

cardinals! your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and

Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached iron part of their harpoons,

'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 cupbearers, 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

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell

Yonder, by the everbrimming 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

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 anthills 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 cricketplayers, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as

schoolboys do to bullies, Take some one of your own size; don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me

down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no

long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye

cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is

laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of

mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

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 goldfish has its glassy globe. His heaveninsulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would

up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock's run down; my heart the allcontrolling weight, I have no

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

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 tonight with

hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim, And break on the lips

A brave stave that who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir (Aside) he's my superior, he has his too, if

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

in chorusFarewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain! Our captain's

Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!

Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear, bellboy? 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

Grand snoozing tonight, 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 groundtier 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

Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the

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, Indianfile, and gallop into the doubleshuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs! Legs!

I don't like your floor, maty; it's too springy to my taste. I'm used to icefloors. I'm sorry to throw cold water

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

Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us. Hoe corn when you may, I say. All legs go to harvest soon.

The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some sleep or lie among the coils of rigging.

Go it, Pip! Bang it, bellboy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bellboy; Make fireflies; break the jinglers!

Merrymad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! split jibs! tear yourselves!

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 nightwomen, that beat headwinds round corners. O Christ! to

think of the green navies and the greenskulled 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.

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 skyborn, hightide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy

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

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?

Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls! the HeevaHeeva! 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.)

How the sea rolls swashing 'gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords,

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 stormlashed guns, on

He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they

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

How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here

there's none but the crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave

hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's

(Aside.) He wants to bully, ah! the old grudge makes me touchy. (Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race

That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that can't be, or else in his one case our old Mogul's firewaters are

Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why

Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jibstay! Blangwhang! 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

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

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 whalecruisers; 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 newstelling 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 worldwide whalingfleet 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

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

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 halfformed 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

But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Not even at the present day has the

original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died

out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent

and courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right Whale, would perhaps either from

professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate,

there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the American flag,

who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is

restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will

hearken with a childish fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the

preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on

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,

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

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

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 whaleships, 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

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

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 snowwhite 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,

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 milkyway wake of creamy foam,

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

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

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the

lineknife 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 fathomdeep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that

suddenly sweeping his sickleshaped 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 onehalf 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

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 straitjacket, 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

narrowflowing 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

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

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

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

allengrossing 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 seventyfour can stand

still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all arush to

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,

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of

its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a

certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title 'Lord of

the White Elephants' above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of

Siam unfurling the same snowwhite quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the

one figure of a snowwhite charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome,

having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this preeminence 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 milkwhite 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 snowwhite 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 andtwenty 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

fiercefanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the whiteshrouded 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

Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a

magnificent milkwhite charger, largeeyed, smallheaded, bluffchested, 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 silverbeaters 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, bluffbowed 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

But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it

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 allpervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be

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

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 milkwhite fog Yea, while

these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his

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

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,

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 slowpacing pilgrims, downcast and hooded with newfallen 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,

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

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedraltoppling 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 housewalls 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

I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime

agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of

terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon,

especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by

these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples.

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers,

starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar

circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky

whiteness as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then

he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real

ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests

till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, 'Sir, it was not so much the fear

of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?'

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of

dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes,

and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the

same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded

prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the

sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in

the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace

to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and

But thou sayest, methinks this whitelead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven

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

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

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

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

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

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 charnelhouse 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

Note: 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 wingfolding,

It was the middlewatch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon, extending from one of the

freshwater butts in the waist, to the scuttlebutt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to

fill the scuttlebutt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarterdeck, 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 afterhatches,

'There it is again under the hatches don't you hear it a cough it sounded like a cough.'

'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

'Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress's knittingneedles fifty miles at sea

'Grin away; we'll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the afterhold 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

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 screweddown

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 logbooks 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

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 herringshoals 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 feedingground 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 oceanline 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 mastheads, when circumspectly

gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path,

And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate feedinggrounds, 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 stoppingplaces and oceaninns, 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 wayside, 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 SeasonontheLine. 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

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the SeasonontheLine. 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 sixtyfive 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 feedinggrounds, 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,

NorWesters, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, might blow Moby Dick into the

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 whitebearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For

the peculiar snow white brow of Moby Dick, and his snowwhite 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

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 lifespot 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 selfassumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly

live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horrorstricken 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.

Note: Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official circular, issued by

Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it appears

that precisely such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented in the circular. 'This

chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly

through each of which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of

which districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have been spent in each month in every

district, and the two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.'

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

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

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 threeyear 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

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

But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity nay, you may call it an

oceanwide renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but

he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as

Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long

did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay?

Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the

Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the

semblance of a snowwhite 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

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

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 whaleline 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 tomorrow 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

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 twofold

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

First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One

day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of Sperm Whales. Ere long, several of the

whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal,

and bore directly down upon the ship. dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less

than 'ten minutes' she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the

severest exposure, part of the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain

Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again

upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing

the sea, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen

Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful

narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.

Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally lost off the Azores by a similar

onset, but the authentic particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the

Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J then commanding an American sloopofwar

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 sloopofwar 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

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

'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

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 seacaptain, 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

In that up and down manly book of oldfashioned 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

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

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

Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople, a

great seamonster 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 cuttlefish

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 seamonster, that for half a century stove

Note: 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

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

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 knighterrantism 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

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

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

Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three mastheads and admonishing them to

keep a bright lookout, 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 leadcolored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a swordmat, 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,

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 crosstrees was that mad GayHeader, 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 lookouts 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

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby

DoughBoy 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 mainmast 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 manofwar's men about to

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 steellike 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, tigeryellow 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,

While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab cried out to the

'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,

offhanded daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goatlike, leaped down the rolling ship's side

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

'Spread yourselves,' cried Ahab; 'give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!'

'Aye, aye, sir,' cheerily cried little KingPost, sweeping round his great steering oar. 'Lay back!' addressing

his crew. 'There! there! there again! There she blows right ahead, boys! lay back!'

'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

'Pull, pull, my fine heartsalive; 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 gingercakes 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 steelbits. Start her start her, my silverspoons! Start her,

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 steeringoar, and so

broadly gaped openmouthed 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

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.

'Halloa!' returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly

'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!

'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 DoughBoy 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

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

Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead

of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. those tiger yellow

creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five triphammers they rose and fell with regular

strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a

Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black

jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against

the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like

a fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip: Ahab was seen

steadily managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at

once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed, while the boat's five oars were

seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the

rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no

distantly discernible token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.

'Every man look out along his oars!' cried Starbuck. 'Thou, Queequeg, stand up!'

Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood erect there, and with intensely

eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme

stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen

coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast

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 masthead of some ship

which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little KingPost was small and short, and at the same time little

KingPost was full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead standpoint of his did by no means

Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting

'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 hearseplumed 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

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 snowflake.

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

Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such fargazing 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 thumbend; but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when

Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped

like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, 'Down, down all, and give

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

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

How different the loud little KingPost. '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

'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, heartsalive. 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

But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger yellow crew of his these were words best omitted

Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes

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 lifelike, 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

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 bowlinggreen; the

brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knifelike 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, sledlike 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

The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more visible, owing to the

increasing darkness of the dun cloudshadows 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

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

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 lightninglike hurtling whisper Starbuck said: 'Stand up!' and

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

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 helterskelter into the white

curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely

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

The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the whole squall roared, forked, and

crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in

these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a

flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker

with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out

the boat. The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office of life preservers. So, cutting the

lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern;

then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standardbearer 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

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

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, goodnatured 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

'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 oiljacket, 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

'Mr. Flask,' said I, turning to little KingPost, 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

'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

'Who would have thought it, Flask!' cried Stubb; 'if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless

'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.'

Among whalewise 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

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 whaleboat in the hunt? As a general thing, the jointowners of the Pequod

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 tholepins 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 semicircular 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

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 ashholes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships

themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of

wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blownoff 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

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 hairturbaned 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

Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several

cruisinggrounds; 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 mainmast head, and stand a

lookout 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, moonlit 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

Walking the deck with quick, sidelunging 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 masthead manned,

the piledup 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 coffintap. 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

This midnightspout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the same silent hour,

it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it

disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at

it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one

whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still

further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it

seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that

whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes,

that unnearable spout was cast by one selfsame whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there

reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on

and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most

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 urnlike 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 ivorytusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and

gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foamflakes flew over her

bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew

the inscrutable searavens. 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 roostingplace 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, snowwhite, and unvarying;

still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at

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 floorscrewed chair; the rain and halfmelted 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 telltale 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

Southeastward 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

foremasthead, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries a whaler

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 hoarfrost. Only her lower sails were set. A

wild sight it was to see her longbearded lookouts at those three mastheads. 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 mastheads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlornlooking fishermen, mildly

eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own lookouts, while the quarter deck hail was being

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

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

'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

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

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,

Note: The cabincompass is called the telltale, because without going to the compass at the helm, the

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 whalingvessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common

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

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 thumbworn files.

And in return for that courtesy, the outwardbound ship would receive the latest whaling intelligence from

the cruisingground 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 cruisingground 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

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 seapeasant. 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 whalehunters, 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 midAtlantic, 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 MenofWar, 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 rightdown hearty

goodwill and brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slaveships 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 crossbones, 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, freeandeasy 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 Merchantseamen, and also all Pirates and ManofWar's men, and

Slaveship sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whaleships; 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

But what is a Gam? You might wear out your indexfinger 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.

GAM. Noun A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a cruising ground; when,

after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats' crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on

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, manofwar, 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 whaleboat 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 whaleboat 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 afteroar 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 selfcommand,

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

The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some noted four corners of

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homewardbound whaleman, the TownHo, 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 TownHo'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 TownHo 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 mainmast. 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

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 thickgilt 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

'Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the

TownHo, 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 swordfish 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

'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 sixandthirty 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 TownHo 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

'"Lakeman! Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?" said Don Sebastian, rising in his

'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 threemasted ships, wellnigh as large and stout

as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far manilla; this lakeman, in the landlocked 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 freshwater seas of ours Erie, and Ontario,

and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan, possess an oceanlike 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 goatlike 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 fullrigged 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

wildocean born, and wildocean 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 buckhorn handled

Bowieknives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some goodhearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner,

who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency

treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but

'It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the

TownHo'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 TownHo; 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

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 fellowmen 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

'"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, sawfish, and filefish, 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

lookingglasses. 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'

'"Aye, aye, sir," said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. "Lively, boys, lively, now!" And with that the pump

clanged like fifty fireengines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the

'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

'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 seausages 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 TownHo 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

'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 whaleship 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 powdercasks 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

'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;

'Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays leading far aloft to where two of his

'"Canallers!" cried Don Pedro, "We have seen many whaleships in our harbors, but never heard of your

'"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

'"Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and ere proceeding further I will tell ye what

'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 billiardroom and barroom; through the holyofholies 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 snowwhite

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 longflung 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

'"Is that a friar passing?" said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded plazza, with humorous

'"Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in Lima," laughed Don Sebastian. "Proceed,

'"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

billiardtables, 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

'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 greenturfed,

flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his redcheeked 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 gailyribboned 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

whalefishery 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 cornfield, and

'"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

'I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly had he done so, when he was

surrounded by the three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding

down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out

of it towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil

ensued; while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and down with a whalepike, calling

upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarterdeck. 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 seaParisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.

'"Come out of that, ye pirates!" roared the captain, now menacing them with a pistol in each hand, just

'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

'"Turn to! turn to! I make no promise; to your duty! Do you want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a

'"Sink the ship?" cried Steelkilt. "Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a

ropeyarn 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."

'"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

'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

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

'"Shall we?" cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it; but at length, in obedience to

Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.

'As the Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain and his posse leaped the barricade,

and rapidly drawing over the slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called for

the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock, belonging to the companionway. Then opening the slide a

little, the Captain whispered something down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them ten in

'All night a wideawake 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

'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 quarterdeck. 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.

'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,

'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

'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 trypots;" 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

'"Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me" and the Captain drew off with the rope to strike.

'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

'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

'"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

'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 TownHo still maintained her

mastheads, 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

'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

'During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the bulwarks of the quarterdeck, and

leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side. In this

attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable vacancy between the boat and the

ship, and down between this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick at the

helm would come round at two o'clock, in the morning of the third day from that in which he had been

betrayed. At his leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his watches below.

'"Yes, rather oddish," said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length before him; "but I think it will answer.

'"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.

Twentyfour 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 foreordaining soul of

Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.

'But, gentlemen, a fool saved the wouldbe 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

'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 mainchains, all at once shouted out, "There she

'"Moby Dick!" cried Don Sebastian; "St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings? Whom call

'"A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don; but that would be too long a story."

'"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 mastheads. All was now a phrensy.

qq.The White Whale the White Whale!qq. 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 TownHo reached her port a savage, solitary place where no civilized creature

resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted among

the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double war canoe of the savages, and setting sail for

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 whaleboat, steered straight before the wind for Tahiti, five

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 warcanoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so much as

'"Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?" demanded Steelkilt; "no lies."

'"Very good. Let me board you a moment I come in peace." With that he leaped from the canoe, swam to

'"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

'Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots of the cocoanut 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

'Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whaleboat 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

'"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

'"Nay," said Don Sebastian; "but I know a worthy priest near by, who will quickly procure one for me. I go

'"Though there are no AutodaF�s in Lima now," said one of the company to another: "I fear our sailor

friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need for this."

'"Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that you will be particular in procuring

'"This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists," said Don Sebastian, gravely, returning with a tall and

'"Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and hold the Holy Book before me that

'"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

Note: The ancient whalecry upon first sighting a whale from the mast head, still used by whalemen in

I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as

he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside

the whaleship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to

advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge

the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale

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 chainarmor 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

Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to be found in the

famous cavernpagoda 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

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 bookbinder's whale winding like a vinestalk round the stock of a

descending anchor as stamped and gilded on the backs and titlepages of many books both old and new

that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique

vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this bookbinder'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

BadenBaden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the titlepage of the original edition of the

But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of Leviathan purporting to be

sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates

of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A. D. 1671, entitled 'A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in

the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.' In one of those plates the whales, like great

rafts of logs, are represented lying among iceisles, with white bears running over their living backs. In

another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.

Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy,

entitled 'A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale

Fisheries.' In this book is an outline purporting to be a 'Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti Whale, drawn by

scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.

I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To mention but one

thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full

grown Sperm Whale, would make the eye of that whale a bowwindow some five feet long. Ah, my gallant

Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the young and tender, free

from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that popular work 'Goldsmith's Animated Nature'. In the

abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged 'whale' and a 'narwhale'. I do not wish to seem

inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the Narwhale, one glimpse

at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine

Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lace�p�de, 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

But the placing of the capsheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific Frederick

Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives

what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best

provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm

Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but

whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field,

Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads

As for the signpainters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oildealers, 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

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 fulllengths, 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 lineofbattle 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, eellike, 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 burlybrowed 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 bonefingers, 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

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

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 lifelike 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

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 halfemptied linetub 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

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 rockslide 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 thicklipped 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 paddlewheels 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

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,

pellmell, 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

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 ninetysix 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

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 noonscene 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 hoveto upon the open

sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of

cuttingin) 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

halferect 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.

On Towerhill, 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 stumpspeech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across

lively sketches of whales and whalingscenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whaleteeth,

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 dentisticallooking implements, specially intended for the

skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their jackknives 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 whalehunter 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 warclub or spearpaddle, 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 seashell or a

shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden network has been achieved; and it has cost steady years

As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailorsavage. With the same marvellous patience, and with

the same single shark's tooth, of his one poor jackknife, 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 warwood, are

frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.

At some old gableroofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the

roadside door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvilheaded whale would be best. But these knocking whales

are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some oldfashioned churches you will see

sheetiron 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

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 standpoint, else so chance like are such observations of the hills, that your

precise, previous standpoint would require a laborious rediscovery; like the Solomon islands, which still

remain incognita, though once highruffed 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 ArgoNavis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of

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

Steering northeastward 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

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

But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all reminded one of mowers. Seen from

the mastheads, 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: 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

meadowlike appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, where the

Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way northeastward 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

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

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 snowslide, 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 reappearing once more,

with a stilettolike cry that startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled out 'There! there again! there

Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yardarms, as in swarmingtime the bees rush to the boughs.

Bareheaded 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

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

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 creamcolor, 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, chancelike 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

'The great live Squid, which they say, few whaleships 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

By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious creature, here spoken of, it is included

among the class of cuttlefish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only

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 whaleline.

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

ropemaker, 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 whaleline 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

Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for

whalelines; 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 goldenhaired 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 whaleline

measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the

tub, not like the wormpipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheeseshaped 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

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 twintubs 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 halfinch in thickness; for the bottom

of the whaleboat 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 linetub, the boat looks as

if it were pulling off with a prodigious great weddingcake to present to the whales.

Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eyesplice 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 towncrier would ever

Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round

the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom

or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as

they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of

the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the

chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or

twenty fathoms (called boxline) 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 shortwarp the rope which is immediately connected

with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the shortwarp goes through sundry mystifications too

Thus the whaleline 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 halfinch white cedar of the whaleboat, when thus

hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing

the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling disasters some

few of which are casually chronicled of this man or that 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 steamengine 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

selfadjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa

of, and run away with where the allseeing 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 whalelines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when

caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, everpresent perils of life.

And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whaleboat, 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

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, flyingfish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio

It was my turn to stand at the foremasthead; 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 mastheads

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

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

'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

'Start her, start her, my men! Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty of time but start her; start her like

thunderclaps, 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

'Woohoo! Wa hee!' screamed the GayHeader 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

But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. 'Keehee! Keehee!' yelled Daggoo, straining

'Kala! Kooloo!' 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 handcloths, 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

'Wet the line! wet the line!' cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat,

dashed the seawater 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

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

'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

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

'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

And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side;

spasmodically dilating and contracting his spouthole, 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!

'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.

Note: 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 cutwater

formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself

from a bluffbowed sluggish galliot into a sharppointed New York pilotboat. 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

According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whaleboat pushes off from the ship, with the headsman

or whalekiller as temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whalefastener pulling the foremost oar, the

one known as the harpooneeroar. 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 bloodvessels 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

Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale starts to run, the

boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves

and every one else. It is then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes

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

To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of

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

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 lightninglike 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, sharpedged 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

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 thirtysix 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

HangHo, or whatever they call it, in China, four or five laborers on the footpath 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

Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's mainrigging 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 portholes. 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 goodnatured 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 capstanhead, 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

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a seafight, 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 decktable are thus

cannibally carving each other's live meat with carvingknives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with

their jewel hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though,

were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a

shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all

slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be

carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be

set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most

hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless

numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a

whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of

But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so nigh him, no more than the

'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

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 kneepans, 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 twolegged cane, he bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time

'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

whalesteak 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

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,

'Fellowcritters: 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

'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!'

'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, fellowcritters, 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.'

'Your woraciousness, fellowcritters, 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

'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

'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 fellowcritters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam' bellies 'till dey bust and

'Now, cook,' said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; 'Stand just where you stood before, there, over

'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

'And have you lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and don't know yet how to cook a

whalesteak? rapidly bolting another mouthful at the last word, so that that morsel seemed a continuation of

'Born in a ferryboat! That's queer, too. But I want to know what country you were born in, cook?'

'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;

'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

'And you have once in your life passed a holy church in CapeTown, where you doubtless overheard a holy

parson addressing his hearers as his beloved fellowcreatures, 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?'

'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

'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 maintop, do you, cook, when you are dead? But don't you know the

'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

'All 'dention,' said the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to

'Well then, cook; you see this whalesteak 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 tomorrow, 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

'Cook, give me cutlets for supper to morrow night in the midwatch. D'ye hear? away you sail, then.

Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go. Avast heaving again! Whaleballs 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.

Note: 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 sidefins), 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

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

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

turtleballs or veal balls. The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise

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 meatpie 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' doughnuts or olycooks, when fresh. They

have such an eatable look that the most selfdenying 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, halfjellied, 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 shipbiscuit into the huge oilpots and let them fry there awhile.

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 meatmarket 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

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your

knifehandle, 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, anchorwatches 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 whalingspades, 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

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 whalingspades, 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.'

Note: The whalingspade used for cuttingin 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

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

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 maintop and firmly lashed to the lower masthead, the strongest point anywhere above a ship's

deck. The end of the hawserlike 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 sidefins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the

hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one

dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts

like the nailheads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mastheads

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 maintop; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious

blooddripping 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 boardingsword, 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

blanketpiece, 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

blubberroom. 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 blubberroom gentlemen

coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the

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

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, closegrained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact,

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 whalebooks. 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

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

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 recrossed 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 mysticmarked whale remains

undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other

phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more

especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude

scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the

seacoast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs

I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems

to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have

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 blanketpieces. Like most seaterms, 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 coldblooded, 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

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter's!

'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

There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The seavultures all in pious mourning, the airsharks 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

Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by

some timid manofwar or blundering discoveryvessel 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

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the CockLane one, and far deeper men

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

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 evercontracting 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

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

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

masthead, and every yardarm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that

blooddripping 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 quarterdeck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the mainchains 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 crutchwise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes

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

waterland, 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

'Aye? Well, now, that's cheering,' cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunderclouds swept

aside from his brow. 'That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. Where

'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

Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began

By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mastheads proved her a whaleship. 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 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 sideladder 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 rifleshot off, and an incorruptible sea and air

rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily

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 maintopsail 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

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 longskirted, cabalisticallycut coat of a faded

walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled,

So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed 'That's he! that's he! the longtogged

scaramouch the TownHo'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 TownHo. According to

this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in question had gained a

He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had been a great

prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a

trapdoor, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vestpocket; 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 greenhand 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 vicargeneral 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 selfdeception of the

fanatic himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to return

'I fear not thy epidemic, man,' said Ahab from the bulwarks to Captain Mayhew, who stood in the boat's

'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

'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

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

It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a whaleship, 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 mastheads, 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 mainroyal masthead, 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,

It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the SpermWhale 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 terrorstricken 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

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

Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, 'Captain, I have just bethought me of my letterbag; there is

a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.'

Every whaleship 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

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

'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 cuttingspade 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.'

'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 boatknife, 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

As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many strange things

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

forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here,and then again hands are wanted there. There is no

staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the

same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was

mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale's back, the blubberhook was inserted into the

original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same

hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as

harpooneer to descend upon the monster's back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases,

circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or stripping

operation is concluded. The whale be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate

parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders

about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a treadmill beneath him. On the

occasion in question. Queequeg figured in the Highland costume a shirt and socks in which to my

eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will

Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bowoar in his boat (the second one from

forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard scrabble scramble upon the

dead whale's back. You have seen Italian organboys holding a dancingape by a long cord. Just so, from the

ship's steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a

It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the

monkeyrope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one.

So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no

more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down to his

wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor

could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his

motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company

of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge

innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here wa a sort of interregnum in

Providence; for its even handed equity never could have sanctioned so gross an injustice. and yet still

further pondering while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and the ship, which would

threaten to jam him still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation

of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a

plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you nap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in

your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the

multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's monkeyrope heedfully as I would,

sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I

I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the ship where he would

occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying of both. but this was not the only jamming jeopardy

he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now freshly and

more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow from the carcase the rabid creatures

And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his foundering feet. A

thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise

Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but

wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly, besides the monkeyrope, with which I now and then jerked the

poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarily ferocious shark he was

provided with still another protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo

continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whalespades, wherewith they slaughtered as many

sharks as they could reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and benevolent of

them. They meant Queequeg's best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the

circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the bloodmuddied water, those

indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer to amputating a leg than a tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose,

straining and gasping there with that great iron hook poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo,

Well, well, my dear comrade and twinbrother, thought I, as I drew in and then slacked off the rope to every

swell of the sea what matters it, after all? are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this

whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your

friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.

But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with blue lips and bloodshot eyes

the exhausted savage at last climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the

side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory glance hands him what? Some hot

'Ginger? Do I smell ginger?' suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. ' Yes, this must be ginger,' peering into

the as yet untasted cup. then standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astonished

steward slowly saying, 'Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. DoughBoy, where

lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, DoughBoy, to kindle a fire in this

shivering cannibal? Ginger! what the devil is ginger? seacoal? fire wood? lucifer matches?

tinder? gunpowder? what the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here?'

'There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,' he suddenly added, now

approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. 'Will you look at the kannakin sir; smell of it, if you

please.' Then watching the mate's countenance, he added: 'The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer

that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and

may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by which he blows back the life into a halfdrowned man?'

'Aye,aye, steward,' cried Stuff, 'we'll teach you to drug a harpooneer; none of your apothecary's medicine

here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got our insurances on our lives and want to murder us all, and

'It was not me,' cried DoughBoy, 'it was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger on board; and bade me never

'Ginger jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers, and get something better. I

hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain's orders grog for the harpooneer on a whale.'

'Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort; and this fellow's a weasel.

When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of teacaddy in the other. The first

contained strong spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity's gift, and that was freely

Chapter lxxiii. STUBB AND FLASK KILL A RIGHT WHALE; AND THEN HAVE A TALK OVER HIM

It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale's prodigious head hanging to the Pequod's

side. But we must let it continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For the present

other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.

Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional

patches of yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the Leviathan that

but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And though all hands commonly

disdained the capture of those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for

them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now

that a Sperm Whale had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was

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

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

'I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,' said Stubb, not without some disgust at the

'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?'

'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

'No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the rigging.'

'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

'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 flagship 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

'I think I remember some such story as you were telling,' said Flask, when at last the two boats were slowly

'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 latchkey to

get into the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?'

'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

'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

'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 doubledarbies, as he

deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the

'Do I suppose it? You'll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep a sharp lookout 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

The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and other necessaries

'Didn't I tell you so?' said Flask; 'yes, you'll soon see this right whale's head hoisted up opposite that

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 thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and

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 crownpiece. But nothing like this, in the present case, had been

done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and the headladen ship not a little resembled a mule

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

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 'greyheaded 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

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 sideline 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

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 sentrybox 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

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

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 steamengines 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

But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow lid of an

immense snuffbox, 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 rightangles with his body, for all the world like a ship's jibboom. This

whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of

his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must,

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, umbrellastocks, and handles to

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 cuttingspade, Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is

lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen

drag stumps of old oaks out of wild woodlands. There are generally fortytwo teeth in all; in old whales,

much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs,

As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a Roman warchariot (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 galliottoed 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

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 fshaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head

for an enormous bassviol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its soundingboard. Then, again, if you fix

your eye upon this strange, crested, comblike incrustation on the top of the mass this green, barnacled

thing, which the Greenlanders call the 'crown,' and the Southern fishers the 'bonnet' of the Right Whale;

fixing your eyes solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird's nest in

its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be

almost sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term 'crown' also

bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a

diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if

this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip!

what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and

five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.

A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be harelipped. 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 ridgepole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half

vertical, scimetarshaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper

part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned.

The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and

in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding

time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves,

hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular

rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical

probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first

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;

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 sixbarreler; 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.

Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink,

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 prairielike 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.

Note: 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

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 batteringram

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

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 boomlike 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 oxhide. 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 lungcelled 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

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 eyebrow. 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

Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the curious

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

The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by the crossing and

recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The

upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as

that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale's vast plaited forehead forms innumerable

strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was

always replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale

contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highlyprized 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

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 pearlcolored membrane, like the line

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

twentysix 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

Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and in this particular instance almost

Note: 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

Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon the

overhanging mainyardarm, 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 singlesheaved 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, handoverhand, 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 shorthandled 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

treasurehunter in some old house, sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this

cautious search is over, a stout ironbound bucket, precisely like a wellbucket, 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 dairymaid's pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the fullfreighted 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 onehanded 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 handhold 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

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

'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,

'In heaven's name, man,' cried Stubb, 'are you ramming home a cartridge there? Avast! How will that help

Almost in the same instant, with a thunder boom, the enormous mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara's

TableRock 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,

buriedalive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor

cleared away, when a naked figure with a boardingsword in 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

'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

'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

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

I know that this queer adventure of the GayHeader'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

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

honeyhunter, 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

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 semisciences to the whale, I will

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 openwork belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from

Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all

his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is

no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your

physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your jollyboat, your noble conceptions of him are

never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist

In some particulars, perhaps, the most imposing physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that

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 godlike 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, semicrescentic depression in the

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 childmagian 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 birthright,

the merry Mayday 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

If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle

In the fullgrown 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 cubicyards 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

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

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 bassorelievo, 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

Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with the first

neckvertebra; 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

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

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

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

'What has he in his hand there?' cried Starbuck, pointing to something wavingly held by the German.

'Not that,' said Stubb, 'no, no, it's a coffeepot, 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

'Go along with you,' cried Flask, 'it's a lamp feeder and an oilcan. He's out of oil, and has come a

However curious it may seem for an oil ship to be borrowing oil on the whaleground, 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 lampfeeder as

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 lampfeeder 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

flyingfish 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

His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales were almost

simultaneously raised from the mastheads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that

without pausing to put his oilcan and lampfeeder aboard, he slewed round his boat and made after the

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

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 whitebone 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

'Who's got some paregoric?' said Stubb, 'he has the stomachache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an

acre of stomachache! 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 ribends, 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

'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

'The ungracious and ungrateful dog!' cried Starbuck; 'he mocks and dares me with the very poorbox 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 bloodvessel? 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

'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 slapjacks 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!

At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lampfeeder at the advancing boats, and also his

oilcan; perhaps with the double view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time economically

'The unmannerly Dutch dogger!' cried Stubb. 'Pull now, men, like fifty thousand lineofbattleship loads of

redhaired devils. What d'ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in twoandtwenty pieces for

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 whiteash breeze! Down with the Yarman! Sail

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 whiteash, 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,

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 whitefire! 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

'Don't be afraid, my butterboxes,' cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as he shot by; 'ye'll be

picked up presently all right I saw some sharks astern St. Bernard's dogs, you know relieve

distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah! Here we go like

three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a

plain makes the wheelspokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way; and there's danger of being

pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones

all a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!

But the monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush,

the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so

fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their

dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at last owing to the

perpendicular strain from the leadlined chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into

the blue the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in

the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of

expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have been taken down and

lost in this way, yet it is this 'holding on,' as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh

from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his

foes. Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the best; for it

is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted.

Because, owing to the enormous surface of him in a full grown Sperm Whale something less than 2000

square feet the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we

ourselves stand up under; even here, aboveground, 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 lineofbattle ships, with all their guns, and stores,

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

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

'Stand by, men; he stirs,' cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly

conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every

oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in a great part from the downward strain at the

bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears

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

His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals there are certain valves or

floodgates 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 bloodvessels, 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 wellsprings of faroff 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 spouthole 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

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 knotholes 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 merrymakings 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.

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 halfstifled melancholy gurglings the

spraycolumn 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 flukechains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would at

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 lancehead 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

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 timberheads to which the flukechains 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 flukechains,

to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends

could not be at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking

'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

'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

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 brokenhearted 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 lineofbattle 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

It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mastheads, announcing

that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a FinBack,

belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless,

the FinBack'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,

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 springhead of it, so

much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many

great demigods 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

lampfeeders. 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 seacoast, 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

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

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 seahorse; 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 socalled 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

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

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

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a memberroll for you! What club but the

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

One old SagHarbor 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

Another reason which SagHarbor (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 figurehead; 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

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 SagHarbor 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

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

Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with

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

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

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

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 buttend 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

today! Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then,

Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we'd drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd

brew choice punch in the spread of his spouthole there, and from that live punchbowl quaff the living

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 towline 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. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really

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;

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 vermicellilike 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

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

It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spouthole; 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

spouthole; 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 Colognewater 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 gaspipe laid down in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns

whether this gaspipe is also a waterpipe; 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

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 spouthole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale's head? For even when

tranquilly swimming through the midday sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sundried 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

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

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

semivisible 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

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

Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that

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

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

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

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

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

Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace

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. Scrollwise 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

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

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 flowermarket, 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

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 kittenlike, 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

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 masthead 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

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 FreeMason 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

Note: 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

The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending southeastward 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 sallyports for the convenience of ships and

whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly,

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 allgrasping 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 topsails 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

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

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

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 circusrunning 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 worldwandering whaleship 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 piglead 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 whaleship, 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

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 lookouts

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

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

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 whalejets were upplaying and sparkling in the

noonday air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twinjets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, falls

over in two branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single forwardslanting 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

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 whiteelephant in the coronation procession of the

Siamese! So with stunsail piled on stunsail, 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 pivothole, crying, 'Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the sails; Malays, sir,

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 overcautious 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 ridingwhips and rowels to her, that they were.

As with glass under arm, Ahab toandfro 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

Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the whiteash, 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 waterlogged 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 lionmaned

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,

any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which

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

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 iceisles in a tempest,

and striving to steer through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be

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

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 druggedharpoons, 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 satinlike 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

circusrider might easily have overarched 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 far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we

gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the

whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted,

was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and

fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal

nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; even so did the young of

these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their

newborn 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

'Line! line!' cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; 'him fast! him fast! Who line him! Who struck?

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

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

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

tailtendon. It is done by darting a shorthandled cuttingspade, 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

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 harpoonline that he towed; he had also run away with

the cuttingspade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught

in the coils of the harpoonline round his tail, the cuttingspade 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,

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 bridalchambers 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 blockice 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

'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

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 hairbreadth 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

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.

Note: 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 selfderived savageries.

Much the same is it with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to NewEngland rocks

with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best

and furthestdescended 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

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 averagesized male. They are comparatively

delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be

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,

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

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 countryschoolmaster 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 mossbearded 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

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

fortybarrelbulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the

most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous greyheaded, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and

The Fortybarrelbull 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

Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic of the sexes. Say

you strike a Fortybarrelbull 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

The allusion to the waifs and waifpoles 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

Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. It was

decreed by the StatesGeneral in A. D. 1695 . But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling

law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have

provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the Bylaws 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.

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast

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 nineinch

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

These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen themselves sometimes consist in

hard words and harder knocks the CokeuponLittleton 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

Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whaletrover 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

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 loosefish; and therefore when a subsequent

gentleman reharpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent gentleman's property, along with

Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale and the lady were reciprocally

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 LooseFish 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,

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

FastFish and LooseFish, 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

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 FastFish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious

landlord is the widow's last mite but a FastFish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion with a

door plate for a waif; what is that but a FastFish? 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 FastFish? What is the archbishop of Savesoul's income of �100,000

seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken backed laborers (all sure of

heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a FastFish? What are the Duke of

Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but FastFish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor

Ireland, but a FastFish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a FastFish? And

But if the doctrine of FastFish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of LooseFish is still

What was America in 1492 but a loosefish, 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 LooseFish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but LooseFish? What all men's minds and

opinions but LooseFish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a LooseFish? What to the

ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but LooseFish? What is the great globe itself

'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

LooseFish, 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

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

Now when these poor sunburnt 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 FastFish. 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,

'We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we

'Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a livelihood?'

'I thought to relieve my old bedridden mother by part of my share of this whale.'

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

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

But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers!

In his treatise on 'QueenGold', or Queenpinmoney, 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

'In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not

It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy,

vapory, midday 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

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 seafowl 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

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

The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recognized his cutting spadepole

'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

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 stempiece 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,' Rosebutton, or Rosebud; and this was the romantic name of this

Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word rose, and the bulbous

'A wooden rosebud, eh?' he cried with his hand to his nose, 'that will do very well; but how like all creation

Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had to pull round the bows to the

Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled 'BoutondeRose, ahoy! are there any

'Yes,' rejoined a Guernseyman from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the chiefmate.

Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over the quarterdeck rail awaiting

his report, he moulded his two hands into a trumpet and shouted 'No, Sir! No!' Upon which Ahab retired,

He now perceived that the Guernseyman, who had just got into the chains, and was using a cuttingspade,

'I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all!' answered the Guernseyman, who did not seem to

'Oh, nothing! It's a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, aint it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw

'What in the devil's name do you want here?' roared the Guernseyman, flying into a sudden passion.

'Oh! keep cool cool? yes, that's the word; why don't you pack those whales in ice while you're working at

'em? But joking aside, though; do you know, Rosebud, 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

'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 masthead to get some fresh air. Some

thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in coaltar, 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

Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the Captain's roundhouse 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 roundhouse ( cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help

Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the Guernseyman 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 Guernseyman 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 Guernseyman, 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 seacaptain, with large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet

vest with watchseals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by the

Guernseyman, who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them.

'Why,' said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, 'you may as well begin by telling him that

'He says, Monsieur,' said the Guernseyman, in French, turning to his captain, 'that only yesterday his ship

spoke a vessel, whose captain and chiefmate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted

'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 whaleship 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

cuttingtackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.

'Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that that in fact, tell him I've diddled him, and

Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties (meaning himself and mate) and concluded

'Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink with the man I've diddled. In fact, tell him

'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

By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernseyman to this effect,

that having a long towline 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

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 boatspade, 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

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

'I have it, I have it,' cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, 'a purse! a

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

Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a

certain Nantucketborn 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 seacoast, 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, hairpowders, 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

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

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

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, Colognewater,

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.

I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling ships in London, more than

two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the

Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung

holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the

sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is, that

upon breaking into the hold, and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is

given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old city graveyard, for the foundations of a

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, fatkettles, 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

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

Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few hands are reserved called

shipkeepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general

thing, these shipkeepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats' crews. But if there happen to

be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a shipkeeper. It

was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nickname, 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 DoughBoy 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 DoughBoy was by

nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tenderhearted, 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 sixtyfive 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 panicstriking 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 eventide, with

his gay haha! had turned the round horizon into one starbelled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of

day, suspended against a blueveined neck, the purewatered 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 evilblazing 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 afteroarsman chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time

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

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

boatknife 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

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, businesslike, 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 moneymaking

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 goldbeater'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 boatknife 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

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

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 misermerman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and

among the joyous, heartless, everjuvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, Godomnipresent, 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

For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the

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

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

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 I sat there at my ease, crosslegged 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 illwill, or petulence, or malice, of any

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 colaborers' 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 illhumor 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

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated

experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of

attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the

table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case

eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in

Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business of preparing

First comes whitehorse, 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 whitehorse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to

Plumpudding 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

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

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

But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubberroom, and

have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the

blanketpieces, 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 pikeandgaffman and a

spademan. The whalingpike is similar to a frigate's boardingweapon of the same name. The gaff is

something like a boathook. 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 spademan stands on the sheet itself,

perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horsepieces. 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

Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this postmortemizing 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 jetblack 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

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 armholes 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 horsepieces 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

Note: 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 tryworks. She presents the

curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. it

The tryworks are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most roomy part of the deck. The

timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and

mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the

masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it

down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping,

battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great trypots, two in number, and each of several

barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with

soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls. During the nightwatches 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 trypot 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

Removing the fireboard from the front of the tryworks, 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;

It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try works were first started on this present voyage. It

'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 tryworks 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 selfconsuming 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

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 whaleship'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 seasofa. 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

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

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 jawbone 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. Tomorrow, 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

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 carefree lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; not that man is

fitted to sit down on tombstones, 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,

Had you descended from the Pequod's tryworks 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

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

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps often but old bottles and vials,

though to the copper cooler at the tryworks, and 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

Already has it been related how the great Leviathan is afar off descried from the masthead; 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

While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the sixbarrel 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 manhandled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can

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

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 quarterdeck enormous masses of the

whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the

tryworks has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship

But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this selfsame ship; and were it not for the

telltale boats and tryworks, 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 tryworks, 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 newleaped 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

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 greasespot somewhere.

Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing

straight through for ninetysix 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 tryworks; 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 mankilling!

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

Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarterdeck, 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

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

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 headwaters 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 awestriking 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 tokenpieces. Here

palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks and stars; ecliptics, hornsofplenty, and rich banners waving, are

in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness and

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

'There's something ever egotistical in mountaintops 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

'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, heavenabiding 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 tryworks, '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 sittingrooms 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 batteringram, 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 KingPost; dodge round the tryworks, 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 hearsedriver, 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 horseshoe nailed on that side; and now he's back again; what does

that mean? Hark! he's muttering voice like an old wornout coffeemill. 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 horseshoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the

gold. And what's the horseshoe sign? The lion is the horseshoe sign the roaring and devouring lion.

'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 ghostdevil, 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

'Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what's that he

'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 scarecrow? 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 crazywitty for my

'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

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 quarterboat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger

captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a darklytanned, burly, goodnatured,

finelooking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons

of blue pilotcloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a

'See you this?' and withdrawing it from the fold that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale

'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

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

tastefullyornamented manropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink them that a onelegged 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,

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 blubberhook, 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 handoverhand 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 swordfish 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

'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 milkywhite head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles.'

'Give me a chance, then,' said the Englishman, goodhumoredly. 'Well, this old greatgrandfather, with the

white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fastline.'

'How it was exactly,' continued the onearmed 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

haphazard 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 whaleline); 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

greatgrandfather 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 crownjewels; 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 harpoonpole 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

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 pillbox 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 whalesurgeon; 'and, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood

'Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,' interrupted the onearmed 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

'My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected Sir' said the imperturbable godlylooking

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

'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 clubhammer 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

bowllike cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a

'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

'What became of the White Whale?' now cried Ahab, who thus far had been impatiently listening to this

'Oh!' cried the onearmed 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

'Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I'm thinking

'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 jackknife, 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

'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 shipload of

precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?' glancing at the ivory

'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

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

Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after

the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of enderby and

sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the

Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this

great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fishdocuments do not make plain; but in that year

(1775) it fitted out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score

of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in

large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly

recorded here, that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great

Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned

In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the sole charge of the vigorous

Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale boat of any sort

in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold full

of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and

thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the

indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons how many, their mother only knows

and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British government was induced

to send the sloopofwar Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a

naval PostCaptain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service; how much does not

appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go on a

tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship well called the 'Syren' made a noble

experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known.

The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.

All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present day; though doubtless the

original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.

The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast sailer and a noble craft every way. I

boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the Patagonian 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 topheavy 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 bullbeef; others, that it was dromedary

beef; but i do not know, for certain, how that was. they had dumplings too; small, but substantial,

symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about

in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you

like billiardballs. The bread but that couldn't be helped; besides, it was an antiscorbutic; 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

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

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 merchantship 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

During my researches in the leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the

musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, 'Dan Coopman', wherefore I

concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale

ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one 'Fitz

Swackhammer'. But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German

in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of

sperm candles for his trouble this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that 'Dan

Coopman' did not mean 'The Cooper', but 'The Merchant'. In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book

treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting account of its

whale fishery. And in this chapter it was, headed 'Smeer', or 'Fat', that I found a long detailed list of the outfits

for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead. I

transcribe the following: 400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish. 550,000

lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of butter. 20,000 lbs. 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 stockfish,

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

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 masthead and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might

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.

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 fullgrown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roastpig?

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, ridgepole, sleepers, and

under pinnings, making up the framework of leviathan; and belike of the tallowvats, dairyrooms,

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 jackknife, 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 tradingship 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 seaside glen

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 wonderfreighted, tribute rendering

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 cocoanut tree, whose plumagelike, tufted droopings

seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathomdeep enfoldings, and the

bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a

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

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 groundvine 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 messagecarrying 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 weavergod, 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, liferestless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay

lounging a gigantic idler! Yet, as the everwoven 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

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

Cutting me a green measuringrod, I once more dived within the skeleton. From their arrowslit 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 yardsticks 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 finbacks 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 fullgrown 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 trapdoors 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

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 eightyfive 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

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to

Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spouthole, 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

In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventytwo feet; so that when fully invested and

extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in

length compared with the living body. Of this seventy two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty

feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain backbone. Attached to this backbone, 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 ivoryribbed 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 newlaid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her

naked bowribs 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

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

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

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

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 billiardball. 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

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

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 outreaching

comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of

whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on

earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of

a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty

theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my

miscellaneous time i have been a stonemason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals, and wells,

winevaults, 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

Detached broken fossils of preadamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty

years past, at various intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in

Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more curious of such remains

is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening

almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of

Antwerp, in Napoleon's time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown

But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct

monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awestricken 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 seamonsters; but at the same time bearing on

the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am,

by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with

man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar

eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000

miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole

world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the

Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the

Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horrorstruck at

this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all

But not alone has this Leviathan left his preadamite 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

Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the whale, in his own osseous

postdiluvian reality, as set down by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.

'Not far from the Seaside, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of WhaleBones;

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

In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will

Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the headwaters of the Eternities, it

may be fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original

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

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

tapemeasure gives seventytwo 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 (reydansiskur, 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 twentyeight feet. And this work was published so late as A. D. 1825.

But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of today 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 highbred, stallfed, 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,

But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to

the almost omniscient lookouts at the mastheads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through

Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons

and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a

chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last

whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago,

overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled

with their thunderclotted 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

But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period ago not a good lifetime the

census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not

one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was

the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whalehunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to

the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whale for fortyeight 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

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 socalled whalebone 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

whalebone 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

But as perhaps fifty of these whalebone 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

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 4000 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

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 graveyards,

cemeteries, and family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children who

were alive seventyfive years ago; and adding this countless host to the present human population of the

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 halfsplintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his

own pivothole 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

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 stakewise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it

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 joychildlessness of

all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally

progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the

deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain

unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some

men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracingsout 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, haymaking suns, and softcymballing, round harvest moons, we must

needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birthmark in the

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 GrandLamalike 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

evercontracting, 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

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

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 jawivory (Sperm Whale) which had

thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of the stoutest, clearestgrained

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;

Like all seagoing ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a

certain offhanded, 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 clumsybladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new treenails 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 vicebench; 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

A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it into one of his

everready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost landbird of strange plumage strays on board, and is

made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of rightwhale bone, and cross beams of sperm whale ivory, the

carpenter makes a pagodalooking 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 sharkbone 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

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 topblocks; 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 halfhorrible stolidity in him,

involving, too, as it appeared, an allramifying heartlessness; yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an

old, crutchlike, 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 lifelong 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 newborn

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 screwdrivers, corkscrews, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nailfilers,

countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screwdriver, 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, openandshut 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 lifeprinciple 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 sentrybox

and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.

THE DECK FIRST NIGHT WATCH Carpenter standing before his vicebench, 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

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 bucklescrew; I'll be ready for them presently. Lucky now (sneezes) there's no

kneejoint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a mere shinbone why it's easy as making hoppoles;

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;

Ahab Advancing During the ensuing scene, the carpenter continues sneezing at times.

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.

No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. What's

Right. It's a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce red flame there!

Umum. 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

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 skylight on top of his head to

Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he speaking to, I should like to know? Shall I keep standing here?

'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here's one. No, no, no; I must have a lantern.

What art thou thrusting that thiefcatcher into my face for, man? thrusted light is worse than presented

Carpenter? why that's but no; a very tidy, and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business

Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people's noses.

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

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.

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

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

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, puddingheads should never grant premises. How long before this leg is done?

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 interindebtedness 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,

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 jawbone 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 haphazardlike. Then, a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into

deep waters with tall, heronbuilt 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 tenderhearted old lady uses

her rolypoly old coachhorses. 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 acalling with his horn for all legs, true

or false, as brewerymen 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 tomorrow; he'll be taking

altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude.

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

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 snowwhite new

ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruninghook of a jackknife in his

hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old

'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; heaveto here for a week to tinker a parcel of old

'Either do that, Sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a year. What we come twenty

'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 deeploaded hull; or how hope

to plug it, even if found, in this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not have the Burtons hoisted.'

'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

'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.'

'Nay, Sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, Sir to be forbearing! Shall we not understand each other

Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most SouthSeamen's cabin furniture), and

pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: 'There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is

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

'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'gallantsails and closereef the topsails, fore and aft; back the mainyard; up Burtons, and break out in

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.

Note: In Spermwhalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a regular semiweekly duty to

conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the casks with seawater; 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 groundtier 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 cornerstone 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 airfreighted demijohn. Topheavy 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 bosomfriend, Queequeg, was seized with a

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,

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

icehouse, 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

longlingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him

thinned, and his cheekbones 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

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 warwood 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 seacustom, 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 whaleboat these coffincanoes were without a keel; though

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, coffincolored 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

Going to his vicebench, 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 sailcloth 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 waterlilies, 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. Rigadig, dig,

'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.'

'From two and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon? Lay it across here. Rigadig,

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 whaleboat! 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 whaleboat. Shame!

During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led away, and the sick man was

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

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 halfwell 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,

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

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, widerolling 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 everrolling 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 newbuilt 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

milkyways of coral isles, and lowlying, 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

tidebeating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing

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 cruisingground, 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

Availing himself of the mild, summercool 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 boatspades, 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

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

Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the

blacksmith halfstupidly 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

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, daughterlike, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went

to a cheerfullooking 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

youngarmed 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

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 carekilling 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

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 churchyard grass; her children twice followed her thither;

and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his

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 deathlonging eyes of such men, who still have left in them some

interior compunctions against suicide, does the allcontributed and all receptive ocean alluringly spread

forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, newlife adventures; and from the

hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them Come hither, brokenhearted; here is

another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.

Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more

oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul

With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark skin apron, about midday, Perth was standing between

his forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an ironwood log, with one hand holding a pikehead in the coals,

and with the other at his forge's lungs, when Captain Ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small

rustylooking 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

'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

'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

'And can'st thou make it all smooth, again, blacksmith, after such hard usage as it had?'

'And I suppose thou can'st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?'

'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 brows; 'if thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy

'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 today. 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 finbone. There's the stuff, flinging the pouch upon the anvil. Look ye, blacksmith, these are the

'Horseshoe stubbs, Sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the best and stubbornest stuff we

'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 towline. 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

'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 powderpan.'

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

'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 needlesleet 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

'No, no no water for that; I want it of the true deathtemper. 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

'Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!' deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron

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 towline 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

harpstring, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, 'Good! and now for the

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, halfbantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh,

Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with

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 hearthstone 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

These are the times, when in his whaleboat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, landlike 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

The longdrawn virgin vales; the mild blue hillsides; as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you

almost swear that playwearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad Maytime, when the

flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy,

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

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

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly

'Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eye! Tell me not of thy teethtiered

sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and

And Stubb, fishlike, 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

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 vaingloriously, sailing

round among the widelyseparated ships on the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home.

The three men at her masthead wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at their hats; from the stern, a

whaleboat 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

topmast crosstrees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a

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

kindlingwood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oilbutt, 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 coffeepot 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

trypots, which, covered with the parchmentlike 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 quarterdeck, the mates and harpooneers were

dancing with the olivehued 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 fiddlebows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the

ship's company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of the tryworks, from which the huge pots had been

removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastile, such wild cries they

Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship's elevated quarterdeck, 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 quarterdeck, 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.

'No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all,' said the other goodhumoredly. 'Come aboard!'

' 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 homewardbound.'

'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 outwardbound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward

And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against it; and so

the two vessels parted; the crew of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding

Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in. And as Ahab,

leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homewardbound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, and

then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial

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

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

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

'He turns and turns him to it, how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homagerendering and invoking brow,

with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun! Oh that

these toofavoring eyes should see these toofavoring sights. Look! here, far waterlocked; 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

'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

wideslaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned

'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 allquickening 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,

'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 fosterbrothers!'

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 waifpole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spouthole; 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

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?'

'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

'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

'Take another pledge, old man, said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fireflies in the gloom, Hemp

'The gallows, ye mean. I am immortal then, on land and on sea,' cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;

Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the slumbering crew arose from the boat's

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 highhoisted boat, was about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun

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 burningglass. 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

astrologicallooking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some moments to catch the

precise instant when the sun should gain its precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was

absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's, was

eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued

to an earthly passionlessness. At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory

leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling into a moment's

revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to himself: 'Thou seamark! thou high and mighty

Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I am but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or canst thou tell

where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be

eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye

that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!'

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he

pondered again, and muttered: 'Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and

Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor,

pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one

jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be tomorrow noon; and yet

with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that

cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now

scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot

from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!'

dashing it to the deck, 'no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level

deadreckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,' lighting

from the boat to the deck, 'thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split

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

In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship halfwheeled upon her heel, her three firmseated

graceful masts erectly poised upon her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one

Standing between the knightheads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he

'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

'Aye,' cried Stubb, 'but seacoal 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

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

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

Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarterdeck; 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

'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, hokypoky 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, hokypoky 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, hokypoky 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

'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

'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 sternsheets,

man; where he is wont to stand his standpoint is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if

'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

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the flashes, a voice was heard at his

'Old Thunder!' said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivothole; but suddenly finding his

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 lightningrods 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

'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.

'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 St. Elmo's Lights(corpus sancti) corpusants! the corpusants!'

All the yardarms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tripointed lightningrodend with

three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three

'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

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 topsailyardarms, 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 sharkwhite 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 masthead 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 spermoil, 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

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

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

'Aye, aye, men!' cried Ahab. 'Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White

Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood

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 tripointed 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

Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahah,

'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 fullfreighted 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 shutterhands. I would not take it.

The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as

beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though

thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins

cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now do I 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

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 panicstricken 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

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.

'We must send down the maintopsail yard, Sir. The band is working loose, and the lee lift is halfstranded.

'Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises, but it has not got up to my tablelands

yet. Quick, and see to it. By masts and keels! he takes me for the hunchbacked skipper of some coasting

smack. Send down my maintopsail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and

this braintruck of mine now sails amid the cloudscud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down

their braintrucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e'en take it for sublime, did I not

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 waterbearer, 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 lightningrod at all in a

storm? Don't you see, you timberhead, 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 lightningrod 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

'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 longtogs 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

gableend eavetroughs, Flask. No more monkeyjackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a

swallowtail, 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.'

'Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of thunder? Um, um, um.

During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's jawbone tiller had several times

been reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached

to it for they were slack because some play to the tiller was indispensable. In a severe gale like this,

while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the

compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the

helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight

that hardly 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 maintopsails 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 stormtossed bird is on the wing. The three corresponding new sails were now bent

and reefed, and a stormtrysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the water with some

precision again; and the course for the present, East southeast 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! ohheyo, 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

twentyfour 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

Ere knocking at his stateroom, 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

'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 errorabounding log? and in this

very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightningrods? 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 ringbolts 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 wouldbe 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

'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

Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice

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 deathtube 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.

Next morning the notyetsubsided 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

'Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the seachariot 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

'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

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

'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

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

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

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 sighttubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.

'Thou poor, proud heavengazer 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 loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck a lance

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,

'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

Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with fascinated eyes

With a blow from the topmaul 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 sailneedle by its

middle, over one of the compasscards. 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

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

Two seamen came. The goldenhued 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

The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handleends of the spindle, round

which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to

Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to form a preliminary handcoil

to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to

'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

'I hold the spool, Sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing,

'What's that? There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's granitefounded College; but methinks he's

'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,

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

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 logline. But Ahab can

mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and

'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

'Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whaleboat. pip's missing. let's see now if ye haven't fished him

up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no

cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off we haul in no

cowards here. Captain Ahab! Sir, Sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again.'

'Peace, thou crazy loon,' cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. 'Away from the quarter deck!'

'The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,' muttered Ahab, advancing. 'Hands off from that holiness! Where

'And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be

'Bellboy, Sir; ship'scrier; 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 snowline. 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

'What's this? here's velvet sharkskin, 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 manrope;

something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, Sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together;

'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

Steering now southeastward 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

At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishingground, 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 halfarticulated 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

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

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 semiintelligent faces, seen

peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than

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 sunrise this man went from his hammock to his masthead 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 lifebuoy 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

The lost lifebuoy 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.

'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

'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 lifebuoy of the coffin, and no more. Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask,

'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 lifebuoy 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, fairandsquare 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

sixtyfive who ran away with a baldheaded young tinker once. And that's the reason I never would work for

lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my jobshop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into

their lonely old heads to run off with me. But heighho! there are no caps at sea but snowcaps. 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 snapspring 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 graveyard tray! But never

mind. We workers in woods make bridalbedsteads and cardtables, 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 lifelines, 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!

The coffin laid upon two linetubs, between the vicebench 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.

' Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with my humor more genially

'Aye, Sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into

'Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, allgrasping, intermeddling, monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, to be

one day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again lifebuoys out of those same

coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jackofall trades.'

'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 gravedigger in the play sings, spade in hand.

'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 soundingboard 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?'

'Art thou a silkworm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get

'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

'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 linetubs, full of tow lines. A most malicious wag, that

fellow. Rattat! 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 lifebuoy of a coffin! Does it go further?

Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortalitypreserver! 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

broadwinged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are

'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.

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 boathook 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 masthead 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 trypots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the lookout. 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;

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

'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

whaleships cruising after one missing whaleboat 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

'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 eightandforty hours let me charter

your ship I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it if there be no other way for

eightandforty 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

'He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night,' said the old Manx sailor standing behind them; 'I heard; all of

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 whaleship in such emergencies, that is, when

placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some

unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab's

iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the

earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in

the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently

occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or

four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career

shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue

Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil,

'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

'Avast,' cried Ahab 'touch not a ropeyarn'; 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,

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.

'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

'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,

'Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man! and a black! and crazy!

'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.'

'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

'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 seventyfours

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, hangdog look, and cowardly!

Jumped from a whaleboat 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 downhearted 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 oceanfold, to slay him the more securely

there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had

been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered

Moby Dick; and now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show

the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against;

now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls

to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night sustains its piercing,

steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy

crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath

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

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.

Now, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step up the deck, unless Ahab was before them;

either standing in his pivothole, or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits, the

mainmast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabinscuttle, 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 nightdamp gathered in beads of dew upon that stonecarved 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

awestruck crew, they seemed polelike 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

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

At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft 'Man the mastheads!'

and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of the

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

'I will have the first sight of the whale myself,' he said. 'Aye! Ahab must have the doubloon!' and with his

own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to

secure to the mainmast head, he received the two ends of the downwardreeved rope; and attaching one to

his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his

hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his

glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye

upon the chief mate, said, 'Take the rope, Sir I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.' Then arranging his

person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured

the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab

gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles, ahead, astern, this side, and that, within the wide

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 deckends 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

lookout 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 redbilled savage

seahawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mastheads 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

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 mizenmast 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

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

The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the lifebuoycoffin 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 whalingships, cross the quarterdeck at the height of

Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had

once been a whaleboat; but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,

'Look!' replied the hollow cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.

'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

'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

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

As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange lifebuoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into

'Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!' cried a foreboding voice in her wake. 'In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad

It was a clear steelblue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that allpervading

azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and

manlike sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snowwhite 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, swordfish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed

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

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

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 closecoiled woe! But so have I seen little

Miriam and Martha, laughingeyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of

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 stepmother 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

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,

'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 boyharpooneer of eighteen! Forty forty forty years ago!

ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and stormtime! 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, walledtown of a Captain's exclusiveness,

which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without oh, weariness!

heaviness! Guineacoast slavery of solitary command! when I think of all this; only halfsuspected, 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 girlwife

I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow

wife? wife? rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her,

Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a

thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey more a demon than a man! aye,

aye! what a forty years' fool fool old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why

weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now?

Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched

from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never

grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed,

and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!

crack my heart! stave my brain! mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I

lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let

me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green

land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No,

no; stay on board, on board! lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That

hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!'

'Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that

hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck's

wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, playfellow 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

'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

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 errandboy 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 flyingfish?

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 faraway 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 halfcut swaths Starbuck!'

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water

That night, in the midwatch, when the old man as his wont at intervals stepped forth from the scuttle

in which he leaned, and went to his pivothole, 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

dogvane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered

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 metalliclike marks of some swift tide rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

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

All sail being set, he now cast loose the lifeline, reserved for swaying him to the main royalmast 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 maintop sail and topgallantsail, he raised a

gulllike cry in the air, 'There she blows! there she blows! A hump like a snowhill! It is Moby Dick!'

Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three lookouts, 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 lookouts, Tashtego standing just beneath him on the cap of the topgallant 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

'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 longdrawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual

prolongings of the whale's visible jets. 'He's going to sound! In stunsails! Down top gallantsails! 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

Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boatsails set all the paddles plying; with rippling

swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, deathglimmer lit up Fedallah's sunken

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

noonmeadow, 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 flagstaff

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 softtoed 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

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 handclappings 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 seafowls longingly lingered over

With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting

'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.

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 opendoored marble tomb; and giving one

sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then,

calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon,

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

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

rowlock. The bluish pearlwhite 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 tigeryellow crew were tumbling over

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 sternwreck 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

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

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 evercontracting 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

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!

The Pequod's prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually parted the white whale

Dragged into Stubb's boat with bloodshot, 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

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?'

'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

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 doublebanked 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 treblebanked

his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances,

pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure

for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some

one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate

means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their

cranes the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her and then hoisting

everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stunsails, like the

doublejointed 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

mastheads; and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing

the deck, binnaclewatch 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

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 overclouded sky fresh troops

of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man's face there now stole some such added gloom as

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

'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

'Good! he will travel slower now 'tis night. Down royals and topgallant stunsails, Mr. Starbuck. We must

not run over him before morning; he's making a passage now, and may heaveto a while. Helm there! keep

her full before the wind! Aloft! come down! Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the foremast head, and

see it manned till morning.' Then advancing towards the doubloon in the mainmast '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,

Note: This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its being

likened to that preliminary upanddown poise of the whalelance, in the exercise called pitchpoling,

previously described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view whatever objects

'D'ye see him?' cried Ahab, after allowing a little space for the light to spread.

'Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for; the topgallant 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 ninetythree leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable from these

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannonball, missent, becomes a ploughshare

'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, spinewise, on the

sea, for by liveoaks! my spine's a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!'

'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

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

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

The rigging lived. The mastheads, 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

'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

It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other thing for the whalespout, 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 keynote 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

'There she breaches! there she breaches!' was the cry, as in his immeasureable bravadoes the White Whale

tossed himself salmonlike 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

'Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!' cried Ahab, 'thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand! Down!

Unmindful of the tedious ropeladders 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 headandhead, 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

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!

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 surfbeaten 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

While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving linetubs, 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, arrowlike, 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

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

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

But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead of standing by himself he

still halfhung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory leg

'Aye, aye,' Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned

'The ferrule has not stood, Sir,' said the carpenter, now coming up; 'I put good work into that leg.'

'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

'Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare boats and rig them Mr.

'Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the unconquerable captain in the soul should

'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 black vomit wrench thee! run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle find him not gone not

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 deathknell 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

'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

'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

'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

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

The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the solitary nightman at the

foremasthead was relieved by crowds of the daylight lookouts, who dotted every mast and almost every

'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 newmade world, and made for a summerhouse 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

'Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes abegging! 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!

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

'Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,' murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled the

newhauled main brace upon the rail. 'God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from

'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; goldbeaten 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

'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 sandhills 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 masthead! 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 tomorrow, nay, tonight,

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 tackleropes on deck and bade him pause.

'Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood; and I feel now like a billow

'Oh, my captain, my captain! noble heart go not go not! see, it's a brave man that weeps; how

'The sharks! the sharks!' cried a voice from the low cabinwindow there; 'O master, my master, come back!'

But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was highlifted 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 whaleboats 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

'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, openmouthed 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!

Masthead 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 maintruck 'Ha! he soars away with it! Where's the old

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mastheads 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 headbeat waves

'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

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

'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

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

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 mainmasthead, he shouted to

Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so

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

'Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on! 'tis the better rest, the shark's jaw

'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 highlifted 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

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 seacrashing 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

Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. 'I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope

'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 sledgehammering seas, the before whalesmitten

bowends of two planks burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly

level with the waves; its halfwading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring

Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's masthead hammer remained suspended in his hand;

and the red flag, halfwrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own

forwardflowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the

'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 lifelong 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,

'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? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother's drawn my

partpay 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 bulllike necks. Through the breach, they

'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

'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 godbullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and

Polepointed prow, deathglorious 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 alldestroying

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

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 eyesplice in the rope's final end flew out of the starkempty tub, knocked

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 lancepole, and spinning,

animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of

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 skyhawk that tauntingly had followed the maintruck

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 deathgasp, 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.

The Drama's Done. Why then here does any one step forth? Because one did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of

Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three

men were tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So. floating on the margin of the ensuing

scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly,

drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round,

then, and ever contracting towards the buttonlike black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like

another ixion I did revolve. till gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by

reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin likebuoy

shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one

whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with

padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew

near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the deviouscruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after