Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer;
he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning
it into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer, sir—queer, queer, very
queer. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his
bedfellow! has a stick of whale’s jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his
leg; he’ll stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing
in three places, and all three places standing in one hell—how was
that? Oh! I don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I’m a sort of
strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like.
Then, a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to
wade out into deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water
chucks you under the chin pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for
life-boats. And here’s the heron’s leg! long and slim, sure enough!
Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must
be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses
her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he’s a hard driver. Look,
driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now
wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand
there with those screws, and let’s finish it before the resurrection
fellow comes a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false,
as brewery-men go round collecting old beer barrels, to fill ’em up
again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real live leg, filed down
to nothing but the core; he’ll be standing on this to-morrow; he’ll be
taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval slate,
smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel, file,
and sand-paper, now!
CHAPTER CIX.
AHAB AND STARBUCK IN THE CABIN.
According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into
the cabin to report this unfavorable affair.[21]
[21] In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil
on board, it is a regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose
into the hold, and drench the casks with sea-water; which
afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by the ship’s
pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight;
while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the
mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious
cargo.
Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa
and the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets
from the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab
with a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him;
and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the
Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new
ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with
his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his
old courses again.
“Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round
to it. “On deck! Begone!”
“Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir.
We must up Burtons and break out.”
“Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here
for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”
“Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make
good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth
saving, sir.”
“So it is, so it is; if we get it.”
“I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”
“And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it
leak! I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky
casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far
worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak;
for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it,
even if found, in this life’s howling gale? Starbuck! I’ll not have the
Burtons hoisted.”
“What will the owners say, sir?”
“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What
cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck,
about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But
look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye,
my conscience is in this ship’s keel.—On deck!”
“Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the
cabin, with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it
almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest
outward manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half
distrustful of itself; “A better man than I might well pass over in
thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in
a happier, Captain Ahab.”
“Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On
deck!”
“Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be forbearing!
Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?”
Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
South-Sea-men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one
Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!”
For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks,
you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of
the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and
as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast
outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware
of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab;
beware of thyself, old man.”
“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!”
murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said—Ahab
beware of Ahab—there’s something there!” Then unconsciously using the
musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little
cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
“Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the mate;
then raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails and
close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burtons,
and break out in the main-hold.”
It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting
Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him;
or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously
forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient,
in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders
were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.
CHAPTER CX.
QUEEQUEG IN HIS COFFIN.
Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold
were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it
being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the
slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight
sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they
go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost
puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone
cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted
placards, vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood.
Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of
staves, and iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the
piled decks were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under
foot, as if you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and
rolled in the sea like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the
ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was
it that the Typhoons did not visit them then.
Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh
to his endless end.
Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the
higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as
harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale,
but—as we have elsewhere seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea;
and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating
all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the
clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen,
the harpooneers are the holders, so called.
Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should
have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where,
stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling
about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at
the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved
to him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his
sweatings, he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and
at last, after some days’ suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to
the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in
those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him
but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his
cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller
and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but
deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony
to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened.
And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so
his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An
awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side
of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any
beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly
wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses
all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could
adequately tell. So that—let us say it again—no dying Chaldee or Greek
had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you
saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his
swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his
final rest, and the ocean’s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and
higher towards his destined heaven.
Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,
what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favor he
asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was
just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he
had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich
war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all
whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes,
and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was
not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead
warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated
away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that
the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their
own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so