Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and
keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your
knives in two—that’s all. Take it easy—why don’t ye take it easy, I
say, and burst all your livers and lungs!”
But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of
his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed
light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious
seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of
red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.
Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions
of Flask to “that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which
he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat’s bow with its
tail—these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that
they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look
over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen
must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage
pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but
arms, in these critical moments.
It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of
the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they
rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless
bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip
for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost
seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the
watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the
top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other
side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and
the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the
ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like
a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling. Not the
raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat
of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first
unknown phantom in the other world;—neither of these can feel stranger
and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds
himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm
whale.
The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and
more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows
flung upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted
everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.
The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales
running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still
rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through
the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to
escape being torn from the row-locks.
Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither
ship nor boat to be seen.
“Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the
sheet of his sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall
comes. There’s white water again!—close to! Spring!”
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when
with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!” and
Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril
so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance
of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent
instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of
fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still
booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like
the erected crests of enraged serpents.
“That’s his hump. _There, there,_ give it to him!” whispered Starbuck.
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron
of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push
from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the
sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by;
something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea,
the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing
eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the
bottom of the ocean.
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar
to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those
boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew
darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.
The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were
useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers.
So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many
failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern;
then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the
standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up
that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There,
then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly
holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,
we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over
the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.
Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.
We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled
by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were
dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the
sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us
within a distance of not much more than its length.
Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant
it tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base
of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen
no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were
dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely
landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut
loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship
had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon
some token of our perishing,—an oar or a lance pole.
CHAPTER XLIX.
THE HYENA.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed
affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast
practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and
more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing.
He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions,
all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an
ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And
as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster,
peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only
sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the
unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am
speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation;
it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before
might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part
of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to
breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with
it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White
Whale its object.
“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the
deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the
water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often
happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he
gave me to understand that such things did often happen.
“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I
think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy
squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off
Cape Horn.”
“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing
close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you
tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask,
for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into
death’s jaws?”
“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I
should like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face
foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind
that!”
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement
of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings
in the water and 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