Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme.
But it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with
such terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in
nature that these things should fail in latently engendering an element
in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its
confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it
was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which,
while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or
whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet
cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged
and mighty man.
But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete
abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart
to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble
and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any
ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their
costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so
far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character
seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of
a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But
this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes,
but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt
see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that
democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God;
Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all
democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among
them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I
shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall
spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all
mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which
hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out
in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart
convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with
doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of
old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles;
who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than
a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest
Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O
God!
CHAPTER XXVII.
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES.
Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of
the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner
engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided
over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a
dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular about
the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old
stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the whale,
in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance
coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would
hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most
exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the
jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself,
there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a
question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a
comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a
sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there,
about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and
not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easygoing,
unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that
thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black
little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would
almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever
he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from
the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in
readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his
legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of
his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air,
whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless
miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and
as in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated
handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal
tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of
disinfecting agent.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A
short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,
who somehow seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personally
and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of
honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost
was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension
of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor
opinion, the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or
at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some
small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This
ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a
three years’ voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted
that length of time. As a carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought
nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They
called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions
of those battering seas.
Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men.
They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the
whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being
armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio
of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the
former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy
and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set
down who the Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of
them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected
for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most
westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists
the last remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied
the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring
harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of
Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones,
and black rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness,
but Antarctic in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently
proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud
warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had
scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer
snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon
of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look
at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have
credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half
believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of
the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended
from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called
them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to
them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been
anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors
most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold
life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what
manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues,
and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six
feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up
at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come
to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro,
Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a
chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod’s company, be it
said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men
before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans
born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the
same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and
military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in
the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I
say, because in all these cases the native American liberally provides
the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.
No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where
the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their
crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner,
the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the
Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon