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. some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted 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 were out of sight around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some do they here? But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the 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 legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the 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 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 knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your 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 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 tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this 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 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 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 those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids. No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of 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 judgment. Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, 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 two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow 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 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 harpoon 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 But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself? In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a 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 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 afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.” A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and 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 as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously. I observed, however, that one 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 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, 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 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 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 abreast. “There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there, 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 of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing 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, 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. 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 arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he 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 of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that? In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few 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. crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, _December_ 31_st_, 1839. THIS MARBLE HARDY, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, _August_ 3_d_, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to 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 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 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 see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls. But the side ladder was not the only strange devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea. This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but forth with a pealing exultation and joy— “The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom. “I saw the opening him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints— No more the whale did me confine. “With speed he flew to my relief, As on verse of the first chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’” “Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is 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 over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But _what_ is this lesson that the book of Jonah 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 prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in 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 water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels’ wards. “Screwed at 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 sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep. “And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes 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 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 bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep. “Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing 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 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; “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 when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his 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 preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements 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 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 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 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 the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is 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 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 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, 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 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 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 wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen. His story being ended with his pipe’s 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 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 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 on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort. Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records. At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to devil.” “Hallo, _you_ sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that? bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!” “Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e _you_, you cannibal, if you 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 his most fearless and malicious assaults! And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, 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 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 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 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 his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales. CHAPTER 15. Chowder. It was quite late in the evening when the 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 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 Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has 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 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 “What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?” “Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched how could I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of see; thou dost not talk shark a bit. _Sure_, ye’ve been to sea before now; sure of that?” “Sir,” said I, “I thought I told Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!” “I am, sir, if her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest I came back; “what did ye see?” “Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there’s a squall coming up, I think.” “Well, also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think 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 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 “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 said Peleg. “Has he ever whaled it any?” turning to me. “Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.” “Well, bring him along then.” And, after 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 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 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 or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o’clock, I went stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?” Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon such way as this:— “Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.” “Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!” Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language, heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove and went to 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? 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 it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up. “Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated. “You housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also 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 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 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 friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained.” “Ye be, be ye? Coming back on the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain 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 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 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, on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the green locker! Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but don’t miss a fair chance 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 The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. 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 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 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 emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently 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 terrors and wonders of God! But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an 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 and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. the ship’s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet every time. The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say. _The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler?_ Who wrote the first _Whaling not respectable?_ Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is declared “a royal fish.” * Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way. _The whale never figured in any grand imposing way?_ In one of the mighty triumphs Roman general upon his entering the world’s capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled 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 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 means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter. Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the 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 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 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 It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said the old Gay-Head Indian 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 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 the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab. Some moments passed, during which 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 mine. I’ll smoke no more—” He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe 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 he shouts? Hark!” “Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts! “If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him! comes this way.” CHAPTER 32. Cetology. Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that 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. * * * Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal” (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839. “Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.” “Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A field strewn with 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 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 above cited extracts will show. Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman. 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 the great poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,—the Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale now reigneth! There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life. Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one 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 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 that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan. The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, 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, Linnæus has given you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded. Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is _a spouting fish with a horizontal tail_. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is still with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position. By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host. *I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in 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. First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large. I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the _Sperm Whale_; of the OCTAVO, the _Grampus_; of the DUODECIMO, the _Porpoise_. FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The _Sperm Whale_; II. the _Right Whale_; III. the _Fin-Back Whale_; IV. the _Hump-backed Whale_; V. the _Razor Back Whale_; VI. the _Sulphur Bottom Whale_. BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER I. (_Sperm Whale_).—This whale, among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the 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 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 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, the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti was really derived. BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER II. 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 baptised. 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 Baleine 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; that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to elucidating the sperm whale. BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER III. (_Fin-Back_).—Under this head I reckon a monster names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic, length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to 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 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 baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated _Whalebone whales_, that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen’s names for a few sorts. In connection 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 regular system of Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; but there again the similitude ceases. And it 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 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 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. it alone is practicable. To proceed. BOOK I. (_Folio_) CHAPTER IV. (_Hump Back_).—This whale is often seen on the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured 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 has baleen. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of them. BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER V. (_Razor Back_).—Of this whale little is known but his name. I have seen him at a distance 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. BOOK I. (_Folio_), and now begins BOOK II. (_Octavo_). OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which present may be numbered:—I., the _Grampus_; II., the _Black Fish_; III., the _Narwhale_; IV., the _Thrasher_; V., the _Killer_. *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 volume, but the Octavo volume does. 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 approach is regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale. BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER II. (_Black Fish_).—I give the popular fishermen’s names for all these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name happens to be 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 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 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 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 employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks 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 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 and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas. BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER IV. (_Killer_).—Of this whale little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the 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 oil he has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included. BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER V. (_Thrasher_).—This gentleman is famous 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 Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless seas. Thus ends BOOK II. (_Octavo_), and begins BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_). DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise. 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, of hugeness. But the creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition of what a whale is—_i.e._ a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail. BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_), CHAPTER 1. (_Huzza Porpoise_).—This is him thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance 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 chance, watch him; and you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature. BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_), CHAPTER II. (_Algerine Porpoise_).—A pirate. Very 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 system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I complete what I have here but begun. If any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as 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, 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, their social equal. Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this—the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea. Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table. It is 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 from my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to 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 peculiar quarters. In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more. Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of any respect the mast-head standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by 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 we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking 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 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 to whalemen) called the t’ gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called _crow’s-nests_, 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 re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” 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, that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:— “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.” Very often do the 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 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 vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful 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 with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! CHAPTER Vehemently pausing, he cried:— “What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?” “Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score him!” “And what tune is it ye pull to, men?” “A dead whale or a stove boat!” More and more strangely and fiercely glad and ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!” “Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, the act of nailing the gold to the mast. “It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul: “a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.” All this while Tashtego, was separately touched by some specific recollection. “Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.” “Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?” “Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever And 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 closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!” “God bless ye,” he seemed to what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?” “I am game for his crooked jaw, 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 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 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 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 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 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 sitting alone, and gazing out_.) I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my let them; but first I pass. Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow 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 shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, 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 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 with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim, And break on the lips while meeting. A the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A viewing of those gallant whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in your boats, my And by your braces stand, And we’ll have one of those fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail! While the bold harpooner is striking the whale! MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward! 2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast to my taste. I’m used to ice-floors. I’m sorry to throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me. MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where’s your was once. 3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm—give us a whiff, Tash. (_They cease dancing, and gather in 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 Up, spine, and meet it! (_Leaps to his feet_.) PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds are a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his whale! ALL. Aye! aye! OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the sky—lurid-like, 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 revenge. For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a 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 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 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 fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come. Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to 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 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 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, few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his 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 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 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 tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him. 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 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 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 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 suggestions 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings. Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his 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 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 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, 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 captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped 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 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 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 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 terrible casualty which had overtaken him. The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all 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 voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed 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 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 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 time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill. CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale. What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of 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 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 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 may be trampling into dust. Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings 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 all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? CHAPTER 43. Hark! that heard the hum of the old Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the chap.” “Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself 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 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 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 So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.* *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by 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; district, and the two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.” Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in _veins_, as they are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line 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 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 that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for. And hence not only at substantiated 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 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 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 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 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 ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any 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, snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long 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 or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as important a one naturally follow of itself. First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an 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 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, similar to this; that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in last time distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale’s eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three no good ground to impeach. Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing 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 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 thump for their presumption. But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity—Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not 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 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 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 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 for it. Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found 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 destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale _has_ done it. 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 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 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 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, 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 of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it. Thirdly: 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 them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so 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 I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore’s interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense. I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s Voyages 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, 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 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 of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath. I might proceed with several more 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 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 prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set down 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 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 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. peculiar substance called _brit_ is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale—squid or cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale. CHAPTER 46. Surmises. Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, 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 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 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 were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for 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 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 the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but two miles off! a school of them!” Instantly all was commotion. The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus. “There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared. “Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!” Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the 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 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 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 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 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 supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere. While in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the 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 often, as Dough-Boy long suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale’s at the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right! Give way, men! It ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!” Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such 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 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 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 chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea. Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still; its commander 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 of his did by no means satisfy King-Post. “I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to 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, 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 Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that. Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a temporary dive hurry, “Down, down all, and give way!—there they are!” To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing 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 four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and 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 on it; then picking it up, flirted it far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat’s stern like 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,” 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 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 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, 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 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 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 often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what 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, 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 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 apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas. These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency 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, began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew 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 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 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 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 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 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 view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home. As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded 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 was being heard from below. “Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?” But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in 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 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 round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them 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 similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings. “Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But turning 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 of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground. If two strangers crossing the Pine 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 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 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, 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, each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed 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 strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments to put on lasting record. *The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin. pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 pig to run at large. “Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times but raging in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale. “Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas. “‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon 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 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 mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the cruising bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the vital jaw of the whale. “But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort 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 they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick. “‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’ “‘A very white, and famous, 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 three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy. ‘The White Whale—the White Whale!’ was the cry from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of 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 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 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 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 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 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 teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared. “In good time, the Town-Ho reached her 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 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 as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam. “‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain. “‘Where are you a moment—I come in peace.’ With that he leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with “‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping into the sea, he swam back to his comrades. “Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and 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; the island of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that destroyed him. * * * * “‘Are you through?’ said Don since the death of Radney.’” CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales. I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong. It may be that the primal source of all those sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him. Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The 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 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 the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale’s majestic flukes. But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter’s portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that? 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 rolling, might be taken for the Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said of these? As for the book-binder’s whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor—as stamped antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder’s fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended when the device was first introduced. It was 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 original edition of the “Advancement of Learning” you will find some curious whales. But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures 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 ice-isles, with white 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 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, which applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye 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 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All 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 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 are, many queer cups and saucers inform us. As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint. But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, 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 to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, 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 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 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 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 curiosity touching this Leviathan. CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes. In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous by. I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous chapter Colnett and 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 admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though. Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are drawn on that you can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living hunters. But, taken for all in all, 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, 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 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 thing is wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black stormy distance the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, think there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery. The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the 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 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 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 other engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster 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 the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen. CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; 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 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 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 New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer. Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some much accuracy. At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that 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 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, 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 starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish. With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we of ripe and golden wheat. On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip. As morning mowers, who side by side through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.* *That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does not bear that name as the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased. But it was only the sound they made as they 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 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 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 him. But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless 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 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 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 subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers. Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews. But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but 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 like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe. Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the 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 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 secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the 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 the negro yelled out—“There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!” Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees 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 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 instantly gave orders for lowering. The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a 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 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 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 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 were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales. Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an 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, 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 boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again. Before and not a harpoon, by your side. CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale. If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of in the bow of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ’parm whale.” The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to 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 fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off 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 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 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 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 handle the spokes. The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight. “Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another fling. The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. 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 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 blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale. “Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along 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 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 clear air of the day. And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst! “He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo. “Yes; both 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 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 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 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 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 it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them. 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 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 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 it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse. Consider, now, how it must be 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 intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted. CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper. Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, 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; 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along 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 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), 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 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 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 universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in 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 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 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 full, dey wont hear you den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can’t hear not’ing at d’ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; bow before you go.—Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t forget.” “Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he ain’t more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock. CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish. That mortal man should feed upon the creature that 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. 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 the crown. The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so 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 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 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 supper have I thus made. In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull 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 _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 feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras. But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre. When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is 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 over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it. Nevertheless, upon lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods. In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous things 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, mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping 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 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 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 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 thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates 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 an opinion. The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of 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 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, 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 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, were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But more of this. Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin. In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably 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 banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of 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 Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of 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 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 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 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 Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. But are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the whale! CHAPTER 69. The Funeral. “Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go 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 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 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 unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and 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 piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free. Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a 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 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 body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason. Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the contrary, subject almost hidden in a discoloured, 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 Stubb’s boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale? When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by 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 as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers’ scales. The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant 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 getting into the main-chains he took Stubb’s long spade—still remaining there after the whale’s decapitation—and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou 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 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 the respective vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable distances and with no small facility. The Pequod’s signal and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine to keep parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes. So soon as this figure he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he declared Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either—” But that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech. “Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back. “Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven 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 frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him. It seemed that the Jeroboam had not 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 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 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 vial!” Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples 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 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 this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair. CHAPTER The Monkey-Rope. In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by 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 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 tread-mill beneath him. On the to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, 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 incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man. Nevertheless, it may he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a 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; No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water! “Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. “Yes, this 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 wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain’s orders—grog for the harpooneer on a whale.” “Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but—” “Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort; and this fellow’s a weazel. What were the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that was freely given to the waves. CHAPTER 73. 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 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 them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered. Nor was this long 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 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 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 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 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 “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 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 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 the Asiatic cholera before he got through with him, I’ll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp—ain’t you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let’s get the whale alongside.” “I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” 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 are at the ship.” The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this right whale’s head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti’s.” In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; float light and right. In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a a pair of overburdening panniers. Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so bandied among them, concerning all these passing things. CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View. 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; 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, the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit, giving token of advanced age large experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a “grey-headed whale.” Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads—namely, the 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 magnitude of the head. Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which 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, 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 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 a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the 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 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, 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 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 without. Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a ladder 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 with his body, for all the world like a ship’s jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion. The jaw slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses. CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View. Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale’s head. As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two 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 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 sulk and pout, by carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more. A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the 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 yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable. In old times, there seem to 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 tongue on each side of his mouth.” *This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a moustache, consisting of a 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, 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 have plainly seen the truth of what I started with—that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one. Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very long in following. Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer 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. CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram. Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have you, as a sensible physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front be found in all recorded history. You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably backwards, so 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 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 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 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 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, beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope; considering the unique interior of 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 would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth of the curious internal structure of the thing operated upon. Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways 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 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 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, 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, lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale’s case. It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and then setting that length down at eighty feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun, 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 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, you, to that marvellous and—in this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale’s great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped. CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets. Nimble as a Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his 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 same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass than the Indian’s, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale’s well. But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makest 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 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 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 qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can. Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has no proper nose. And since the nose 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 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 perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect is track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so in man, is Lavater’s mark of genius. But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is 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 the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as 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 may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can. CHAPTER 80. The Nut. If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle 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 you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the 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 to the world. Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that 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 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 call this high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to you see that big tin can there alongside of him?—that’s his boiling water. Oh! he’s all right, is the Yarman.” “Go along with you,” cried Flask, his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship’s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager 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 wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea. Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as 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 at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble. “Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 the head of the German harpooneer, their three Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s headlong rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force, that both Derick 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. 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 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 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 here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman men on board. As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single 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 his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears! In that sloping afternoon sunlight, shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head! “Stand by, 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 when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea. “Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.” The lines, of which, long quick coils flung back all dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship’s lengths of the hunters. His motions plainly denoted his extreme at least instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure 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 far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into 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. 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 most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings 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 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 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 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 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, the carcase sank. Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of 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 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 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 in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale’s, that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick 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 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 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, 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. a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale. Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the 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 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 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 of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan. But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versâ; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demi-god named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That 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 to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as Regarded. 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 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 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 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 have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless. Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for 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 effected his escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called “The Whale,” as some craft are nowadays christened the “Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.” Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, 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 coast. How is that? But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He 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 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 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 some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event. Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them, they 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. or later inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What then remained? Of all the wondrous devices 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 drawbacks. As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling comes into play. Look now at Stubb; a man who 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 the lance full before his waistband’s middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his 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!” returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping 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 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 should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor—this is surely a noteworthy thing. Let us, then, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time. It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water or whether it be vapor—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea. Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting 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 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 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 also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain 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 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 found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as 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 lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head? For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see 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 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 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 goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity 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 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 alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail. Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across. The entire member seems a so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were tail acts in a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by. Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts with man, he lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the whale-boat, and the 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 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, 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 round his trunk and extracted the dart. Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see his power 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. at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating 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 in the profoundest silence. The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of 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 balls.* *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 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 hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas. Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway 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, day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged. With a fair, fresh wind, the 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 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 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 touch no land? does his crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years’ water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to come; they would only answer—“Well, boys, here’s the ark!” Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the near 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 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 sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually rising and falling 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 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 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 tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with 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, 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 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 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; 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 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 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’ 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 completely paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the not infinitely outdone by the madness of men. Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is to 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 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 and only exist in a delirious throb. As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself 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 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 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 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 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 these drugged-harpoons, were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from 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 valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted 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 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 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 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 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 Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him fast!—Who line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one little!” “What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck. “Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down. As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.* *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 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 discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute _more hominum_. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. Meanwhile, 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 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 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 cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it dismay wherever he went. But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with we perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about 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 the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum 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 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 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 Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made 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 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 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, The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast 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 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 down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and 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 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 to expound it. First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or 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 be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But others are by no 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 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 now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat. Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord 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, her. Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other. These pleadings, and the it to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish) acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs. A common man looking at this 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 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 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 rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good £150 from the precious oil a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale’s head, he says—“Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden’s.” Upon 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 Warden?” “The Duke.” “But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?” “It is his.” “We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this whale.” “It is his.” “Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?” “It is his.” In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington received 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 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 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 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 that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea. “I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they would keel up before distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours 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 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 that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general. The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, the lines that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales. “There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship’s 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 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, 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 bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale; and so talk over it. Arrived then at this spot, with one to be the chief-mate. “Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?” “_What_ whale?” “The _White_ Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him? “Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no.” “Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call 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 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 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 six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought alongside.” Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired 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 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 the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship. “What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for it’s so calm they won’t drift.” By this time Stubb was 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, engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line. Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod 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 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 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 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 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 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 untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate? I opine, 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 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 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 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 very pleasant savor. But all this is quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling 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 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 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 accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own. Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the 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 find it needful. Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened, in 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 minute, this entire thing happened. “Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved. So soon as he recovered himself, the 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 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, gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted 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 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 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 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 Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the like abandonment befell myself. CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand. That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod’s side, other things akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works. First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough tendons—a wad of muscle—but still contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the marble. Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often 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 mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I 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 a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, open, and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye 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 three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and 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 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 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 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? old hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!” “If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the 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 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 Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London. “Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?” So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat. “Hast seen the White Whale?” “See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet. “Man my boat!” 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 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 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 one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange captain, over the cutting-tackle.” As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, 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 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 sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.” “It 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 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 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 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 late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink—” “Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with the arm story.” be preserved to future ages, you rascal.” “What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been impatiently listening to this 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, 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 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 other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.” “No, thank ye, Bunger,” 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. 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 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 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 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 send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of 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 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 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 for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed. The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many 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 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 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 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 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 vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial natives pledge 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 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 102. A Bower in the Arsacides. Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately 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 specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely 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, canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores. Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, him curly-headed glories. Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, 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 Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s. In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon 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, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale. CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton. In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to the general structure we are about to view. In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet; so that when fully invested and 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 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 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 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 when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. But the spine. For that, the best tapers off at last into simple child’s play. CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale. From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. 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 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 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 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 to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils. Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at 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 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 horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled. Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the venerable John a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The 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, 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 not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple.” In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there. CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish? Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down his sires. But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier ones. Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the Alabama one mentioned in tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s authority, that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture. But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an advance in magnitude upon those of all 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 a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, sixty feet. And Lacépède, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work was late as A.D. 1825. But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if of all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have degenerated. But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated 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 a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction. But you must look at this matter end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, 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, is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate to all pursuit from man. But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded 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 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 Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined. Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more, therefore at population of the globe. Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. 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 see him supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that 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, 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 out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains 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_) 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort. 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 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; sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness. To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified itself. his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!” CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith. Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There’s the stuff,” flinging the pouch upon the 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 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 here, and make the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.” For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near. “No, no—no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered. “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed 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; boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are 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 whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:— “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.” And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours were flying from 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 which, covered with the parchment-like _poke_ or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched hands the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship’s as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled into the sea. Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on a glass and a bottle in the air. “Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply. “No; only heard of him; but don’t believe for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings. CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale. Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab. 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 rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns. Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying—the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that strange spectacle, beheld 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, heads some other way. “Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. “Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!” CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch. The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to windward; one, and that boat was Ahab’s. The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which gently chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach. Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but 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 coffin can be thine?” “And who are hearsed that die on the sea?” “But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a sight we shall not soon see.” thee.” “The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea,” cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;—“Immortal on land and on sea!” Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead whale was brought to the ship. CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant. The season for observation of the sun to determine his latitude. Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with 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 seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but 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 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 cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship’s high teetering side, stove in “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 song says;”—(_sings_.) Oh! jolly is the gale, And a joker is the whale, A’ flourishin’ his tail,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! The scud all a flyin’, That’s his flip only foamin’; When spicin’,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! Thunder splits the ships, But he only smacks his lips, A flip,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! “Avast Stubb,” cried Starbuck, “let the Typhoon sing, and strike his 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 the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel’s way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a ship’s lightning-rods are readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require. “The rods! the rods!” cried Starbuck to the 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 curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath 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 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 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 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 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 afloat. The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d’ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the water with some precision again; and the course—for the present, East-south-east—which he was to Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding 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 Thou know’st what to say.” CHAPTER 124. The Needle. Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the 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 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 energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea. The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel 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. 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 the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea. Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men. down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea. The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where it always hung 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 to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; men. At the time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful he could hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard. “Hast seen the White Whale?” “Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?” Throttling his joy, Ahab 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; hump and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat—a reserved one—had been 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 ship to unite with his own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping back the coat and watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.” “He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old Manx sailor standing 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 “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 and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him 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 might seem to hint them. “I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye! Ahab must have the doubloon!” and with his own hands with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead, astern, this side, and that,—within the wide expanded 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; 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 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 black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea. CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight. The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse. “Hast seen the White Whale?” “Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his trumpet them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!” “Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou 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 Symphony. It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep. sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and 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, 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 bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for 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; 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 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 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 on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail. CHAPTER 133. The his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, 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 polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream. “Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!” Thundering with the butts of 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 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 they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans. “And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the 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 in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by 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. his mouth. Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter 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 again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like 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 not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam. On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who 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, and destroyed before. And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still 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 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 his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell. “The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego. In long Indian file, as 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 his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; 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 stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea. Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance, 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 its summit with their scud. *This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him. 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 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 for them to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed 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 pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue. Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, 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 power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances, in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales. The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field. “By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck creeps up 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 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 she breaches!” was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that was central; and cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head,—that is, pull straight up to his forehead,—a not uncommon thing; for when 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 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 his to shreds. But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack 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. 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 rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous stirred bowl of punch. While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and sent it, turning over 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 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 thee with warnings:—what more wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety 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 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, 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 pecks my brain. _I’ll_, _I’ll_ solve it, though!” When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward. So once more the sail was mast and almost every spar. “D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight. “In his infallible wake, though; but follow 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 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; 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. 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 there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head—keep a good eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail.” He gave the word; afterwards are missing, Starbuck!” “Truth, sir: saddest truth.” “Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like a the ship, when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that 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 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 a signal from the mast-heads—a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow. “Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing 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 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 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 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 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 men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.—Where’s the whale? gone down again?” But he looked too nigh the boat; for as 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 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 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; the blades became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip. “Heed them not! those teeth but give new oars. Pull on! ’tis the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding water.” “But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!” “They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”—he muttered—“whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive, now—we near him. The 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 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 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 clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming. Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns in upon him!” Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam. Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?” “The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen. “Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, ship?” But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water. Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer remained suspended in his beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he. “The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug 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? 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 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 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 aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume. “The ship! The hearse!—the second “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 comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! _Thus_, I give up the spear!” The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths. For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The 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 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. Epilogue “AND I buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin,
