Moby Dick; or The Whale
by
Herman Melville
Part 12 out of 12
But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly
round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his
vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more
deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him,
as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's
elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered
in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple
to swim,--though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart
of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen,
like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst.
From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly
eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not
succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.
For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect,
and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles
he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them.
And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by;
still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be
the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways,
Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape.
With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of
the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head.
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's
mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;
and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!--"Sail on the"--
but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed
him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise
on a towering crest, he shouted,--"Sail on the whale!--Drive him off!"
The Pequod's prows were 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, blinded eyes,
the white brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension
of Ahab's bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded
to his body's doom for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom
of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants.
Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds
from out ravines.
But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much
the more abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, great hearts
sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those
shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives.
And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering;
still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate
a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities;
for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain
the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning
on one bended arm--"is it safe?"
"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it.
"Lay it before me;--any missing men?"
"One, two, three, four, five;--there were five oars, sir, and here
are five men."
"That's good.--Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him!
there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!--
Hands off from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again!
Set the sail; out oars; the helm!"
It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew,
being picked up by another boat, help to work that second boat;
and the chase is thus continued with what is called double-banked oars.
It was thus now. But the added power of the boat did not equal
the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked
his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed,
that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase
would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one;
nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted,
intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one
brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens,
offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase.
Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up
to their cranes--the two parts of the wrecked boat having been
previously secured by her--and then hoisting everything to her side,
and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it
with stunsails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross;
the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby Dick. At the well known,
methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly
announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported
as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck,
binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted
hour expired, his voice was heard.--"Whose is the doubloon now?
D'ye see him?" and if the reply was No, sir! straightway he commanded
them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on;
Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft,
or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still
greater breadth--thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat,
at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon
the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern.
At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh
troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man's face
there now stole some such added gloom as this.
Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though,
to evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place
in his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed--
"The thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir;
ha! ha! ha!"
"What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck?
Man, man! did I not know thee brave as fearless fire
(and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a poltroon.
Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck."
"Aye, sir," said Starbuck drawing near, "'tis a solemn sight;
an omen, and an ill one."
"Omen? omen?--the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright
to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads,
and give an old wives' darkling hint.--Begone! Ye two are
the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed,
and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands
alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men
his neighbors! Cold, cold--I shiver!--How now? Aloft there!
D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten
times a second!"
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
Soon it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
"Can't see the spout now, sir;--too dark"--cried a voice from the air.
"How heading when last seen?"
"As before, sir,--straight to leeward."
"Good! he will travel slower now 'tis night. Down royals and
top-gallant stunsails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him
before morning; he's making a passage now, and may heave-to a while.
Helm there! keep her full before the wind!--Aloft! come down!--
Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see
it manned till morning."--Then advancing towards the doubloon
in the main-mast--"Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it;
but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead;
and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall
be killed, this gold is that man's; and if on that day I shall again
raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye!
Away now! the deck is thine, sir!"
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle,
and slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at
intervals rousing himself to see how the night wore on.
CHAPTER 134
The Chase - Second Day
At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab after allowing a little space
for the light to spread.
"See nothing, sir."
"Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;--
the top-gallant sails!--aye, they should have been kept on her all night.
But no matter--'tis but resting for the rush."
Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,
continued through day into night, and through night into day,
is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery.
For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience,
and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among
the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale
when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances,
pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue
to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable
rate of progression during that period. And, in these cases,
somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general
trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again,
but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass,
and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible,
in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland,
eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass,
with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked,
through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures
the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness is almost
as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot's
coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill,
the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake,
is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land.
And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly
known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time
his rate as doctors that of a baby's pulse; and lightly say of it,
the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot,
at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions
when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,
according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves,
so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles,
will have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude.
But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind
and the sea must be the whaleman's allies; for of what present avail
to the becalmed or wind-bound mariner is the skill that assures him
he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port?
Inferable 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 cannonball, 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 one's legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I
are two brave fellows!--Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me,
spine-wise, on the sea,--for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel.
Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!"
"There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!"
was now the mast-head cry.
"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and split
your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump--
blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts
his watergate upon the stream!"
And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew.
The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them
bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale
fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before;
these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing
awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,
as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison.
The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring
perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense;
the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild
craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things,
their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies
of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible
as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency
which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple,
and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran
into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way,
both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so,
all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear;
guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness,
and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord
and keel did point to.
The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of
tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs.
Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other
with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the
vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars
in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate.
Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek
out the thing that might destroy them!
"Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after the
lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.
"Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd
jet that way, and then disappears."
It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken
some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved;
for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed
to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra,
that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharge of rifles.
The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--
much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet,
less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick bodily burst into view!
For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush
of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal
his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching.
Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,
the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure
element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam,
shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more.
In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane;
in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.
"There she breaches! there 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 he raised,
for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier;
and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first
sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower
in a vale.
"Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and
thy harpoon are at hand!--Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore.
The boats!--stand by!"
Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men,
like shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays
and halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly
was dropped from his perch.
"Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat--a spare one,
rigged the afternoon previous. "Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine--
keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!"
As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being
the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now
coming for the three crews. Ahab's boat was central; and cheering
his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head,--
that is, pull straight up to his forehead,--a not uncommon thing;
for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes
the coming onset from the whale's sidelong vision.
But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all
three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye;
the White Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in
an instant as it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws,
and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side;
and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat,
seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank
of which those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred,
incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field;
the boats for a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a
plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's unearthly slogan
tore every other cry but 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
of the three lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened,
and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the planted
irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew aside
a little, as if to rally for a more tremendous charge.
Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line;
and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again--
hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls--when lo!--
a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!
Caught and twisted--corkscrewed in the mazes of the line,
loose harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points,
came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's boat.
Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically
reached within--through--and then, without--the rays of steel;
dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman,
and then, twice sundering the rope near the chocks--dropped the
intercepted fagot of steel into the sea; and was all fast again.
That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining
tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged
the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes;
dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach,
and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom,
in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced
round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly 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 aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial,
twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks;
and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up;
and while the old man's line--now parting--admitted of his
pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;--
in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils,--
Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by
invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea,
the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom,
and sent it turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again--
gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it,
like seals from a sea-side cave.
The first uprising momentum of the whale--modifying its direction
as he struck the surface--involuntarily launched him along it,
to a little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made;
and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling
with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar,
bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin,
his tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea.
But soon, as if satisfied that his work for that time was done,
he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing
after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way
at a traveller's methodic pace.
As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight,
again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat,
picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else
could be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks.
Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions;
wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope;
shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no
fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one.
As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging
to his boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float;
nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day's mishap.
But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him;
as instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder
of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him.
His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
"Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner
who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has."
"The ferrule has not stood, sir," said the carpenter, now coming up;
I put good work into that leg."
"But no bones broken, sir, I hope," said Stubb with true concern.
"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!--d'ye see it.--
But even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account
no living bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one
that's lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much
as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being.
Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?--
Aloft there! which way?"
"Dead to leeward, sir."
"Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down
the rest of the spare boats and rig them--Mr. Starbuck away,
and muster the boat's crews."
"Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir."
"Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate!
that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such
a craven mate!"
"Sir?"
"My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane--there, that
shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet.
By heaven it cannot be!--missing?--quick! call them all."
The old man's hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company,
the Parsee was not there.
"The Parsee!" cried Stubb--"he must have been caught in-"
"The black vomit wrench thee!--run all of ye above,
alow, cabin, forecastle--find him--not gone--not gone!"
But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee
was nowhere to be found.
"Aye, sir," said Stubb--"caught among the tangles of your line--
I thought I saw him dragging under."
"My line! my line? Gone?--gone? What means that little word?--
What death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were
the belfry. The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,--
d'ye see it?--the forged iron, men, the white whale's--no, no, no,--
blistered fool; this hand did dart it!--'tis in the fish!--Aloft there!
Keep him nailed-Quick!--all hands to the rigging of the boats--
collect the oars--harpooneers! the irons, the irons!--hoist the
royals higher--a pull on all the sheets!--helm there! steady,
steady for your life! I'll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe;
yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay him yet!
"Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,"
cried Starbuck; "never, never wilt thou capture him, old man--
In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness.
Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once
more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone--all good
angels mobbing thee with warnings:--what more wouldst thou have?--
Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man?
Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea?
Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,--
Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"
"Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since
that hour we both saw--thou know'st what, in one another's eyes.
But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face
to me as the palm of this hand--a lipless, unfeatured blank.
Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed.
'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this
ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders.
Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.--Stand round men, men.
Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance;
propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab--his body's part;
but Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs.
I feel strained, half-stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates
in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack;
and till ye hear that, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet.
Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud,
and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will twice
rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore.
So with Moby Dick--two days he's floated--to-morrow will be the third.
Aye, men, he'll rise once more,--but only to spout his last!
D'ye feel brave men, brave?"
"As fearless fire," cried Stubb.
"And as mechanical," muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward,
he muttered on: "The things called omens! And yesterday I talked
the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly
I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!--
The Parsee--the Parsee!--gone, gone? and he was to go before:--
but still was to be seen again ere I could perish--How's that?--
There's a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts
of the whole line of judges:--like a hawk's beak it 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 shortened, and everything passed
nearly as on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers,
and the hum of the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight,
as the men toiled by lanterns in the complete and careful
rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their fresh weapons
for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab's wrecked
craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as on
the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle;
his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial;
sat due eastward for the earliest sun.
CHAPTER 135
The Chase - Third Day
The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once
more the solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved
by crowds of the daylight look-outs, who dotted every 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 that wake, that's all.
Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going.
What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for
a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its
throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world.
Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks;
he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal
man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege.
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our
poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm--
frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which
the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair
is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it;
but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere,
between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava.
How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn
shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to.
A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors
and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes
blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!--it's tainted.
Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.
I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet,
'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it?
In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting
at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes
stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.
Even Ahab is a braver thing--a nobler thing than that.
Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most
exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless,
but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a
most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!
And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there's something
all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds,
at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong
and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark,
however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack,
and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about,
uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles!
these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on;
these Trades, or something like them--something so unchangeable,
and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there!
What d'ye see?"
"Nothing, sir."
"Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See
the sun! Aye, aye, it must be so. I've over-sailed him.
How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing me now; not I, him--
that's bad; I might have known it, too. Fool! the lines--
the harpoons he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night.
About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look outs!
Man the braces!"
Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the
Pequod's quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction,
the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned
the cream in her own white wake.
"Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw," murmured Starbuck
to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail.
"God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from
the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God
in obeying him!"
"Stand by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket.
"We should meet him soon."
"Aye, aye, sir," and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding,
and once more Ahab swung on high.
A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages.
Time itself now held long breaths with keen suspense.
But at last, some three points off the weather bow, Ahab descried
the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads
three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.
"Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick!
On deck there!--brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye.
He's too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake!
Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast,
and I must down. But let me have one more good round look aloft
here at the sea; there's time for that. An old, old sight, and yet
somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it,
a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same--the same!--
the same to Noah as to me. There's a soft shower to leeward.
Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere--
to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms.
Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then;
the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye,
old mast-head! What's this?--green? aye, tiny mosses in these
warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab's head!
There's the difference now between man's old age and matter's.
But aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls,
though are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that's all.
By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way.
I can't compare with it; and I've known some ships made of dead trees
outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers.
What's that he said? he should still go before me, my pilot;
and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at
the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs?
and all night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to.
Aye, aye, like many more thou told'st direful truth as
touching thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short.
Good 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; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered
through the cloven blue air to the deck.
In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his
shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent,
he waved to the mate,--who held one of the tackle--ropes on deck--
and bade him pause.
"Starbuck!"
"Sir?"
"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."
"Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."
"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever 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 billow that's all one
crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;--shake hands with me, man."
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.
"Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble heart--go not--go not!--see, it's a
brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"
"Lower away!"-cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him.
"Stand by for the crew!"
In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabin-window there;
"O master, my master, come back!"
But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then;
and the boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship,
when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters
beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars,
every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied
the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening
to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times
apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures
hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east.
But these were the first sharks that had been observed by the Pequod
since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it
was that Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians,
and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks--
a matter sometimes well known to affect them,--however it was,
they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.
"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side,
and following with his eyes the receding boat--"canst thou
yet ring boldly to that sight?--lowering thy keel among
ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase;
and this the critical third day?--For when three days
flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure
the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third
the evening and the end of that thing--be that end what it may.
Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me
so deadly calm, yet expectant,--fixed at the top of a shudder!
Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons;
all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl; thou fadest
in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes
grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing;
but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming?
My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day.
Feel thy heart,--beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!--
stave it off--move, move! speak aloud!--Mast-head there!
See ye my boy's hand on the hill?--Crazed; aloft there!--
keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--mark well the whale!--
Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he tears the vane"--
pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--"Ha, he soars
away with it!--Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight,
oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!"
The boats had not gone very far, when by 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, he held on his way
a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining
the profoundest silence, as the head-bent 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 without a lid;
and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can
kill me! Ha! ha!"
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles;
then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged
berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound
was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths;
as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances,
a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.
Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment
in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep.
Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant
like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes,
leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble
trunk of the whale.
"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him,
Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates'
boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks;
and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed
one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment
a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish's back;
pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night,
the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him,
the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment
frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand.
"Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long lean breath--"Aye, Parsee! I see
thee again.--Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse
that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word.
Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats
are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me;
if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but
offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon.
Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--
Where's the whale? gone down again?"
But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping
with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last
encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick
was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed
the ship,--which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction
to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped.
He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent
upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.
"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now,
the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not.
It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"
Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was
swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas.
And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near
as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he leaned
over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about,
and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval.
Glancing upwards he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo,
eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen
were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been
hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them.
One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,
he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask,
busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances.
As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats;
far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart.
But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag
was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego,
who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag,
and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.
Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the
resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore;
or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him:
whichever was true, the White Whale's way now began to abate,
as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more;
though indeed the whale's last start had not been so long a one
as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying
sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat;
and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades
became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea,
at almost every dip.
"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars.
Pull on! 'tis the better rest, the sharks' 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 helm! take the helm! let me pass,"--and so saying two of the
oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging
along with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely
oblivious of its advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab
was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off
from the whale's spout, curled round his great Monadnock hump;
he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back,
and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted
his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.
As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into
a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled
his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole
in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been
for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung,
Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea.
As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the precise
instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects--
these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two
of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on
a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third
man helplessly dropping 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 with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew
to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark;
the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug,
it snapped in the empty air!
"What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!--'tis whole again; oars! oars!
Burst in upon him!"
Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale
wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in
that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship;
seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions;
bethinking it--it may be--a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden,
he bore 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, last time
upon his mark! I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men!
Will ye not save my ship?"
But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through
the 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 hand; and the red flag,
half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself
straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart;
while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit 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 me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must,
in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say--ye fools, the jaw! the jaw!
Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities?
Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay!
Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow
drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart.
My God, stand by me now!"
"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will
now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee,
thou grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake,
but Stubb's own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon
a mattrass that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood!
I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars!
I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost.
For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand
the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there'll be
plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes
and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy
and over salted death, though;--cherries! cherries! cherries!
Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"
"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow.
Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this;
if not, few coppers will now come to her, for the voyage is up."
From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive;
hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained
in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments;
all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side
to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad
band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.
Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect,
and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his
forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.
Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks,
the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks.
Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents
down a flume.
"The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat;
"its wood could only be American!"
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel;
but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off
the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time,
he lay quiescent.
"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! Let me
hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine;
thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck,
and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,--death--glorious ship! must
ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride
of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life!
Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.
Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows
of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death!
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale;
to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee;
for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins
and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine,
let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied
to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward;
with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul.
Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him
round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim,
he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.
Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew 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 ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim,
bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous
Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed
by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches,
the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on
the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself,
and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole,
and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex,
carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over
the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches
of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards
of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings,
over the destroying billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red
arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act
of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.
A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards
from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag,
and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept
its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood;
and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged
savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there;
and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial
beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag
of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink
to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her,
and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf;
a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed,
and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five
thousand years ago.
Epilogue
"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"
Job.
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?--
Because one did survive the wreck.
It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was
he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman,
when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on
the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat,
was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene,
and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship
reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex.
When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool.
Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like
black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle,
like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre,
the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its
cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force,
the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over,
and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost
one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main.
The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on
their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.
It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search
after her missing children, only found another orphan.
ETYMOLOGY
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)
The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain;
I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars,
with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay
flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust
his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by
what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out,
through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the
signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true."
--HACKLUYT
"WHALE. ... Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness
or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted."
--WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY
"WHALE. ... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger.
Wallen; A.S. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow."
--RICHARDSON'S DICTIONARY
KETOS, Greek.
CETUS, Latin.
WHOEL, Anglo-Saxon.
HVALT, Danish.
WAL, Dutch.
HWAL, Swedish.
WHALE, Icelandic.
WHALE, English.
BALEINE, French.
BALLENA, Spanish.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Erromangoan.
EXTRACTS
(Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian)
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm
of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long
Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random
allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever,
sacred or profane. therefore you must not, in every case at least,
take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic,
in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it.
As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets
here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining,
as affording a glancing bird's eye view of what has been
promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan,
by many nations and generations, including our own.
So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am.
Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world
will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong;
but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too;
and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full
eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness--
Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much more pains ye take to please
the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!
Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye!
But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with
your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing
out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long
pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming.
Here ye strike but splintered hearts together--there, ye shall
strike unsplinterable glasses!
"And God created great whales."
--GENESIS.
"Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;
One would think the deep to be hoary."
--JOB.
"Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah."
--JONAH.
"There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made
to play therein."
--PSALMS.
"In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,
shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that
crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea."
--ISAIAH
"And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this
monster's mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all
incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the
bottomless gulf of his paunch."
--HOLLAND'S PLUTARCH'S MORALS.
"The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:
among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much
in length as four acres or arpens of land."
--HOLLAND'S PLINY.
"Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the
former, one was of a most monstrous size. ... This came towards us,
open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea
before him into a foam."
--TOOKE'S LUCIAN. "THE TRUE HISTORY."
"He visited this country also with a view of catching
horse-whales, which had bones of very great value for their teeth,
of which he brought some to the king. ... The best whales were
catched in his own country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty
yards long. He said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two
days."
--OTHER OR OCTHER'S VERBAL NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN FROM
HIS MOUTH BY KING ALFRED, A.D. 890.
"And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that
enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are
immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it
in great security, and there sleeps."
--MONTAIGNE. - APOLOGY FOR RAIMOND SEBOND.
"Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan
described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job."
--RABELAIS.
"This whale's liver was two cartloads."
--STOWE'S ANNALS.
"The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling
pan."
--LORD BACON'S VERSION OF THE PSALMS.
"Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an
incredible quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale."
--IBID. "HISTORY OF LIFE AND DEATH."
"The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward
bruise."
--KING HENRY.
"Very like a whale."
--HAMLET.
"Which to secure, no skill of leach's art
Mote him availle, but to returne againe
To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart,
Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine."
--THE FAERIE QUEEN.
"Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a
peaceful calm trouble the ocean til it boil."
--SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. PREFACE TO GONDIBERT.
"What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid
sit."
--SIR T. BROWNE. OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE. VIDE HIS V. E.
"Like Spencer's Talus with his modern flail
He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
...
Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears,
And on his back a grove of pikes appears."
--WALLER'S BATTLE OF THE SUMMER ISLANDS.
"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or
State--(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man."
--OPENING SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN.
"Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a
sprat in the mouth of a whale."
--PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.
"That sea beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream."
--PARADISE LOST.
"There Leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land; and at his gills
Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea."
--IBID.
"The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of
oil swimming in them."
--FULLLER'S PROFANE AND HOLY STATE.
"So close behind some promontory lie
The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,
And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way."
--DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS.
"While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut
off his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will
come; but it will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water."
--THOMAS EDGE'S TEN VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS.
"In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
nature has placed on their shoulders."
--SIR T. HERBERT'S VOYAGES INTO ASIA AND AFRICA. HARRIS COLL.
"Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced
to proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their
ship upon them."
--SCHOUTEN'S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION.
"We set sail from the Elbe, wind N. E. in the ship called The
Jonas-in-the-Whale. ...
Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but that is a fable. ...
They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a
whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains. ...
I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel
of herrings in his belly. ...
One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in
Spitzbergen that was white all over."
--A VOYAGE TO GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.
"Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I
was informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight
of baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of
Pitferren."
--SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS.
"Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was
killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness."
--RICHARD STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS. A.D. 1668.
"Whales in the sea
God's voice obey."
--N. E. PRIMER.
"We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to
the northward of us."
--CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D. 1729.
"... and the breath of the whale is frequendy attended with
such an insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain."
--ULLOA'S SOUTH AMERICA.
"To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,
We trust the important charge, the petticoat.
Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale."
--RAPE OF THE LOCK.
"If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that
take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest
animal in creation."
--GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.
"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make
them speak like great wales."
--GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.
"In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it
was found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were
then towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves
behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us."
--COOK'S VOYAGES.
"The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in
so great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid
to mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,
and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to
terrify and prevent their too near approach."
--UNO VON TROIL'S LETTERS ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S
VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772.
"The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen."
--THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.
"And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?"
--EDMUND BURKE'S REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-FISHERY.
"Spain--a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe."
--EDMUND BURKE. (SOMEWHERE.)
"A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be
grounded on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the
seas from pirates and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are
whale and sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught
near the coast, are the property of the king."
--BLACKSTONE.
"Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends
The barbed steel, and every turn attends."
--FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK.
"Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,
And rockets blew self driven,
To hang their momentary fire
Around the vault of heaven.
"So fire with water to compare,
The ocean serves on high,
Up-spouted by a whale in air,
To express unwieldy joy."
--COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S VISIT TO LONDON.
"Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a
stroke, with immense velocity."
--JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A SMALL SIZED ONE.)
"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of
the water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
gushing from the whale's heart."
--PALEY'S THEOLOGY.
"The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet."
--BARON CUVIER.
"In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take
any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them."
--COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI
WHALE FISHERY.
"In the free element beneath me swam,
Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
Fishes of every color, form, and kind;
Which language cannot paint, and mariner
Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
To insect millions peopling every wave:
Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands,
Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
And trackless region, though on every side
Assaulted by voracious enemies,
Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw,
With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs."
--MONTGOMERY'S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD.
"Io! Paean! Io! sing.
To the finny people's king.
Not a mightier whale than this
In the vast Atlantic is;
Not a fatter fish than he,
Flounders round the Polar Sea."
--CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE.
"In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the
whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:
there--pointing to the sea--is a green pasture where our children's
grand-children will go for bread."
--OBED MACY'S HISTORY OF NANTUCKET.
"I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the
form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones."
--HAWTHORNE'S TWICE TOLD TALES.
"She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been
killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago."
--IBID.
"No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he
threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to
look at. He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!"
--COOPER'S PILOT.
"The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
whales had been introduced on the stage there."
--ECKERMANN'S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.
"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have been
stove by a whale."
--"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF
NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY
A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN
CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL. NEW
YORK, 1821.
"A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
The wind was piping free;
Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
As it floundered in the sea."
--ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.
"The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the
capture of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or
nearly six English miles. ...
"Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four
miles."
--SCORESBY.
"Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous
head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he
rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him
with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.
... It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of
the habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so
important an animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so
entirely neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity among
the numerous, and many of them competent observers, that of late
years, must have possessed the most abundant and the most convenient
opportunities of witnessing their habitudes."
--THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.
"The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True
Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon
at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at
once so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being
regarded as the most dangerous to attack of all the known species of
the whale tribe."
--FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, 1840.
October 13. "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head.
"Where away?" demanded the captain.
"Three points off the lee bow, sir."
"Raise up your wheel. Steady!"
"Steady, sir."
"Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?"
"Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she
breaches!"
"Sing out! sing out every time!"
"Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there--there--thar she blows -bowes
-bo-o-os!"
"How far off?"
"Two miles and a half."
"Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands."
--J. ROSS BROWNE'S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE. 1846.
"The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the
horrid transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island
of Nantucket."
--"NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS. A.D. 1828.
Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at
length rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved
by leaping into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable."
--MISSIONARY JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT.
"Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and
peculiar portion of the National interest. There is a population of
eight or nine thousand persons living here in the sea, adding
largely every year to the National wealth by the boldest and most
persevering industry."
--REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U. S. SENATE,
ON THE APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET. 1828.
"The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a
moment."
--"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S
ADVENTURES AND THE WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE
HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE COMMODORE PREBLE."
BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.
"If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will
send you to hell."
--LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS
BROTHER, WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER VERSION OF THE
WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE.
"The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in
order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India,
though they failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the
whale."
--MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.
"These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound
forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the
whalemen seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same
mystic North-West Passage."
--FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED.
"It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being
struck by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with
look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse
around them, has a totally different air from those engaged in regular
voyage."
--CURRENTS AND WHALING. U. S. EX. EX.
"Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to
form arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may
perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales."
--TALES OF A WHALE VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.
"It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these
whales, that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the
savages enrolled among the crew."
--NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND RETAKING OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.
"It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
departed."
--CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.
"Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
perpendicularly into the air. It was the while."
--MIRIAM COFFIN OR THE WHALE FISHERMAN.
"The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope
tied to the root of his tail."
--A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND TRUCKS.
"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably
male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less
than a stone's throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which
the beech tree extended its branches."
--DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST.
"'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw
the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the
boat, threatening it with instant destruction;--'Stern all, for your
lives!'"
--WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.
"So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,
While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!"
--NANTUCKET SONG.
"Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right,
And King of the boundless sea."
--WHALE SONG.
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