Work Text:
You may make enquiries of the great architects Thornton, Bulfinch, and Latrobe, as they upraise the portico of the Capitol and loftily outspread its stony wings to north and south, to make a roof over our representatives; you receive just the same answer of a housewife pouring raisins and candied oranges into her copper plum-pudding mold, to set long sail across a boiling sea - it is the disposition and arrangement of parts, that forms them into a whole. For, poured into our copper-bottomed Pequod, we were the close-knit body of a whaleship crew; and poured out of her, we knew such dissolution as the men who raised that Heaven-assailing tower with brick for stone and slime for mortar.
It was not that the instant we were disembarked we lost the use of English altogether; but we were so whirlingly and widely dispersed - and in such circumstance! - that there was not one more word that could be exchanged between us in future.
A press of the hand - a godspeed - a few choice oaths to season the occasion - and there goes the man who seemed almost another limb to you, in the fearful flurry of the chase.
And surely it is this very anonymity of farewell, which gives rise to such mysterious and profound confidences between whalemen when at sea: do not those half-unconscious murmurings in the forecastle - the stark unveilings of entire lives - seem disclosed to every man and none, and to plunge themselves invisibly into that private fraternity of feeling?
But not all our anchoring-ropes were cut; though I drank the depths of that parting-glass, in the faint hope of that I might one day receive some news of my fellows, or chance to meet them again, I had no need of reviewing the Whaleman's Shipping List for the whereabouts of my friend Queequeg.
He was engaged, in fact, in a very polite conversation with the landlady of the Try-Pots.
"Always work for a good harpooneer," Mrs. Hussey was saying. "And specially with sich civil Inglish, Mr. Queequeg; though I wonder how a man goes out on a Nantucket boat and gets such a New-Yorkish speech. Yes, it's a knock-down and no mistake, shipmates, but you'll be righted! - and there's enough to pay for the room, at least."
"A knock-down? that's all it comes to?" said I in exasperated wonder to Queequeg, once we were sat crowded in one corner to await our victuals. There was such a state of general despondency, that our comrade the Sicilian sailor was at present employed in trying to sell his spare shirt.
In fact, I had such hot words to say, that I thought I had better employ Queequeg's own language in place of English so as not to be turned at once out of doors.
There are learned authorities that state, that the fault in having a sandbar enclosing Nantucket Harbour is the deeper draught of our present deepwater ships, riding their way at a lower plumb than that seven-foot clearance; there are even "SOME", as Mr. Obed Macy has recorded, who felt that the employment given to a considerable quantity of men, in unloading ships in lighters, counterbalanced the expense and even the risk of disaster. But let it be said, before we tilt in the lists at those SOME - let it be said, before heaping upon the head of Mrs. Hussey and all her kin such a sandy opprobrium, that in the year 1803 the town meeting at Nantucket proposed unanimously to dig a channel from Brant Point to the outer part of the bar, and it was Congress which denied them the funds.
Let not unlettered Ishmael propose to unwind the deliberations of that body, or to explore into the springs and mechanisms of the legislature - but let me only stand before these gentlemen and in my mere spun-yarn experience plead my suit.
Behold, sirs, behold! That noble and long-enduring Pequod, five years and only two miles out! That well-salted and battered Pequod, with her Prometheanly hard-won cargo of whale oil! That Pequod which had before her only a stop at Martha's-Vineyard for repairs, and then another bold sally upon the Atlantic Line!
"Well, boys, it's only money, and they say that's the root of all evil, or didn't ye know? Heave them away, don't look so gingerish about it; here's your oil on troubled waters! Here's a good dose of antimony for her - won't she be relieved at such a purgation!" - I should have Stubb say those encouraging words to them, and all around them the dark casks hurtling down like a black snow upon the white one, and the rigging sugar-frosted in ice, "Not so down-in-the-mouth, my lads; oh! it's $30 at least we'll get for the hull and sails at auction!"
And Starbuck emerging pale upon the quarterdeck, and with a dead-calm to his voice: "That's enough, Mr. Stubb; she's bilged," and Flask trampling on his hat, and calling that someone ought to fetch the camels and float us away - all that six-hour struggle, for the mighty wooden ribs of the Pequod, and the greasy sap of her in her heart-wood; and the steam-ship bearing us away group by group, like a mechanical man come to replace a live one.
Oh! this is enough to convince a man that there is no profit to any toil under the sun, and that every one of us who sets out in some enterprise has only deluded and mazed himself as to his powers of action. How sober we plume ourselves, and yet within an instant we are pinned with the dreaming opium-eater, beneath the weight of nightmare.
I did not have, that evening, the presence of mind to blame the United States Congress of 1803. No; in fact; I declared to Queequeg, that I should hope that Nantucket Harbour having gobbled up the Pequod, that silt-toothed mouth might choke on it, and make a despairing barricade out of stoved timber and dashed hopes.
This, said Queequeg, was an injustice upon Nantucket; since shoals, sandbars and treacherous reefs are found even beyond New England; he recounted a melancholy incident of his youth, where his cousin had drowned in similar circumstances on a fishing expedition. For after a decent interval had been observed, and he might again venture upon the waters which had furnished the tragic scene, no trace of that stout and ideally hollowed canoe was found; it was as though it had never existed. Whether it had sunk unfathomably far into the seabed, or been carried away by inches and splinters, he could not say, but for all the magnitude of the Pequod, he imagined it would dissolve just as entirely in the unmerciful embrace of eternity.
Then came Mrs. Hussey with two bowls of chowder, the sole consolation of a blasted existence. "Oh! That's wonderfully South-Seas-ish," she said, "you sound just like a Mr Ishmael Kanaka lately at Manhattan; you shall be able to barter at the Islands for breadfruit and hogs."
"Mrs. Hussey," said I, "we were discussing the destiny of mankind."
-
"I am composing a memoir," I informed my friend Queequeg, halfway up the stairs; "available by subscription: it shall be entitled Lack of incidents of a whaling voyage."
Queequeg reminded me, that we had at least had the adventure of a long drifting down from Japan to Niihau, on account of the loss of the quadrant, and exchanging a good portion of our cargo for yams and sundry fresh produce.
"All right," said I, "I shall title it Interminable details of the beginning stages of scurvy, for a general audience or, Witticisms of ships' mates: good, indifferent, and unmentionable."
I had touched a chord in Queequeg, on that point - for what account, said he, should he render up of his voyagings, on his return home? There he would set foot again to that familiar harbour, with perhaps $70 to his pocket, and a greatly expanded knowledge, as to the types and varieties of human vice and debauchery up and down the American coast, and a history of a desperate and defeated pursuit of a white whale.
And there, said Queequeg, warming to his theme, and becoming more than a little ironical, he might meet again his own sister; but adorned with an ivory pendant of singular beauty and design; and with her hair dressed with a new white comb and hair-pins; and with an ambergrisiacal scent about her neck.
A white whale! she should say, what sort of a white whale detained you? And Queequeg would describe the irons spirally lodged into his breast - a strange coincidence! she should say, well, it was not entirely a white whale; only one snow-white triangulate hump distinguished him, and the rest was mottled.
And Queequeg with a mounting suspicion would inquire, as to the crookedness of his jaw?
And to his astonishment his sister would explain, that under the providential bounty of the sea's own tutelary deity, what seemed that very whale had been beached and stranded upon their shores; though the name she knew him by was not Moby-Dick, and vouchsafed upon him were certain heavenly hints, and signs, which were thinkingly deciphered over his corpse. Alas! what death-groans, what labours he had expired under; but what a cornucopia abounded in him when his last struggle ceased! How gladly they had feasted upon every ounce of life-giving meat! What a wealth of sinew was unbound from him! Nor was a drop of oil wasted; nor (with a gesture to her jewellery) the stout jaw-bone and teeth of this prodigy.
In the bleak view I was presently taking of all human endeavour, this somewhat light-hearted phantasy of Queequeg's but made the putrefactory and headless carcasses we whalers had dispatched into the sea roll ceaselessly before my eyes. And besides, I was in a sad sympathy, with his attempts to extract some cheering kernel of truth from his sojourns among the Christians.
Compress that Western sphere, down to the flat circle of a coin; behold that appalling underside, which poor Queequeg had the thorough acquaintance of from Martha's Vineyard to Sag Harbour; and then turn your coin over to the bright head-side. What gleamings! what prosperities, what happy securities! But what has gone to forge that face? Oh, let us not go down to the sea in ships, if we wish not to discover it; let us imagine nothing but gallant industry in the crucible of that minting! For that coin, as though tossed in a Clootie- or Mimir-well, lies at the very burl-pin and turningpoint of a maelstrom of commerce, and the broader world, goods, labour and all, comes whirling down to it by fragments.
Nevertheless, I assured Queequeg, that there was a bold virtue in travelling even for its own sake - and besides, in being the first Rokovokan to set foot in these lands remote to him, he should be counted among the whalemen who are a sort of discoverer. Indeed a superior one - for though that celebrated Raleigh, was willing to condescend as far as to wet his overcoat a little in a puddle by way of philanthropy, I have not once heard of him jumping into a more prodigious body of water to retrieve any one. And as for that far-famed Magellan - what mighty and appalling beast confronted him, in his circumnavigation? Only a plump and guileless penguin, of the same dimensions as a flour-sack.
We paid the proper respects to Yojo, and, I being raised a good Protestant, was much pleased at being now able to comprehend the prayers offered up to him in the vernacular. All ceremony concluded, we turned in for the night; except that after some little time I noticed the room still flickeringly lit and sprang out of bed again.
"Well, here's a thrifty candle from Mrs. Hussey," I said, "I should almost apologise to the beef-cow it was squeezed out of; what a smoaky bad light! You should think the sun were put out at last, and we were paddling about like crawfish in a cave. I'll blow it out; it shan't make much of a difference. Good heavens, Queequeg - and mid-November now! Shan't ye remember the look of me by the time I should be visible in spring?" at this turn, I sang out, the candle having retained its heat if not its light. "I'm only surprized - it's a good thing I've palms harder than Durer's rhinoceros from my labours - and d'ye heed this tallow-candle-Mrs-Hussey declaring us 'coofs' after five years blubber whaling, on account of a difference of accent? Why, my fine friend, I should sound like a born Nantucketer if I wished to - just so - there, there, give it to him, Queequeg!""
This I said in such a low-voiced tone, as not to gally even the timidest of sperm whales; but it nevertheless gallied poor Queequeg, who declared, that he should not only retrieve his pantaloons, but take ship at once to the Arctic, and live out the rest of his days with only polar-bears for company.
However, this was not by the nature of a binding vow, that he had taken upon himself, and even the loftiest of human resolutions may come to grief. That cozy occasion; that peaceful and undisturbed little room of our own; and our very amiable conversings were a tonic to the spirit; so that so far from encountering a single wintry bear, we strayed not an inch from Nantucket, and confined our efforts to knocking the headboard five inches out of the frame.
"Oh well," I said, being very far, at that moment, from taking this too gravely, "Mrs Hussey'll think we've declared a limitless war upon all her goods and furnishings; well then..."
I was engaged in practising a very unscientific massage upon Queequeg's shoulders, which had had hard use. He made some general observations on being able to repair the damage, but without any intention, at that present moment, to spring to anything, except sprawling half across my breast, and affectionately nudging at my feet.
Everything was peace and quietude; I was catching back my breath; and something caught at me, which I could not at first describe.
In firmly maintaining that the whale is a fish and not a mammal, I should marshal up beside me Galen of Pergamon; for that melancholy that fleetingly overtakes every hot-blooded creature after their conjunction escapes the whale entirely, more humano though they might conduct themselves. I have observed two sperm whales drift apart from the most vigorous sport, with a sort of cool politeness, as though they had been two Kentuckians exchanging a how-d'ye-do; and I am sure that had you taken their pulse at that moment, it should not have exceeded 90 beats the minute. Were an Avicenna to say to his cetacean patient: your lady-whale dwells by such-and-such a reef, in such-a-such a longitude and latitude of the bountiful ocean, not a flicker of the arteries would be perceived.
But that brief pensiveness is only a return to our former equilibrium of temperament, and I am very far from agreeing with Thomas Browne that humanity should reproduce itself after the manner of trees, nor with Spinoza that we are vexed at realising we have not grasped the supreme good at such moments, but only an irrational sensual enthralment.
Well then, do you lie where I lie, thou Browne and thou Spinoza! What different contemplations about this question should then arise to your minds! Yet away with ye, philosophers! - I should rather not cede my present position to you, out of a foolish sort of covetousness.
But in my veins rushed and swelled the cold salt-tide that had foundered the Pequod; and I almost felt had foundered me. Oh thou Ishmael, what hand do you have, to put to your own tiller? what hopes? what assertions? Here lie you in warmth and oblivion; ah, how meanly and falsely you are foresworn! What a ringing emptiness, when you rap upon the world's foundations; what a fountainhead of gore comes jetting and spouting out of it at every instant; by what right dost thou forget? And I could not have told you, whether I thought myself more a traitor to Ahab, or to my own self.
Thus abstracted, I let my hands drift from Queequeg's shoulders; he made some inchoate sound of protest, and I did what I could, to convey these reflections to him.
Neither of us were well-served to make an explanation of Ahab; but he said to me that he felt himself strangely routed; though routed without sight of an enemy; and like to myself, in feeling he had somehow fled the field, for all his strivings and darings; that he should, without the full knowledge of the case against him, be heartily ashamed. I had my hand now upon his arm, and felt that familiar cicatrice, for the tempering of the harpoon - not that it was, by harpooning standards, much of a scratch! but it made a sorry sort of addition to that general inscription of Queequeg's skin.
And are you to arraign Queequeg, then, thought I, for dereliction of his post? being, alongside his Pagan comrades, the specially picked lieutenants of that frustrated mission? And can you rightly court-martial your own self, and declare him in the same case innocent?
This is indeed a very bad reasoning to get yourself out of a bad set of propositions, Ishmael; but man's power of existence being so very partial, he must do as he can to sustain it.
I pressed a kiss upon that arm, and drew him to my embrace, and very tenderly said to him: "Ah, my friend, whither thou goest -- " only I was at once interrupted in these loving words, by Queequeg declaring I should not once more personate Mr. Starbuck under any circumstances, or at least not these circumstances, and I endeavouring to explain the difference between the thee-thou of Shakespeare and the Book of Ruth, and the thee-thou of the sperm-whale fishery.
-
As for that Starbuck, we passed by him the next morning on the street; for Queequeg and I were on our way to run a much-delayed errand of his, and Starbuck and his family were venturing to the Meeting-House.
He had been the long-awaited and steadfast hope of his dear Mary, and that final and scarce-believed reunion, which had been protracted by a further two years from that first painful separation, cannot be comprehended by one who has not torn the damp seams of a packet of five-year-old letters, by such longing and long-repeated folding and unfolding of them.
When he beheld his son, so bloomingly grown, he was astonished to match the childish face of his recollection with this hearty young newcomer; for a deepwater whaleman is a sort of Rip Van Winkle.
To the miseries of so small a tonnage of oil salvaged was not added any deficiency whatsoever in his wife's management of business; so that his happiness might have been complete, had he not carried such a store-house of recollection about his heart.
Alas! I confess that I set a little kindling to those troubled embers, by a certain sense of mortification on that chance meeting; for I could not but remember my Nantucket-accent of the night before.
"Strange enough! - shouldn't they greet me? After five years! And such a flinching - good God - as if I were a sulfur-match! - Yet wait. Perhaps those men mark me more truly, more honestly! - mark that unbidden rejoicing in my breast at that terrible stranding, if that should so strangely prove the means of thwarting our deathly purpose? and mark in me - aye, but that wild heathenish crew has their humanities, Starbuck - their mildnesses - that they should shudder to mark - God! - methinks that revolved thought has pressed so many times to my forehead that it has dinted me - has pressed that invisible and secret mark of Cain!
No, no, heaven forbid it! Let my acts speak for me alone - and yet if I hold my wife, that sees still in me that honest-hearted young groom - 'tis concealed from her! Do I strive to instruct my son, on a clear conversation and an upright life - 'tis falsely done!
Oh, that dear and thousandfold-imagined hearth; that confiding companion of my heart; what monstrous influences do I introduce? But what is it that I must confess? Were those contemplations more than a phantasm, if - but that pitiful old man! his dreadful final look upon the steamship deck! and if thy wife should convey thou to the Meeting-House, Ahab, and I meet thine eye each week eternally?"
And pondering in this way, he sat very thoughtfully down in Meeting, among that company of Friends; what a great number of women were there! for fathers, brothers, sons and husbands were conscripted upon that cetacean warfare, in which not a single drop of human blood is spilled - at least on the enemy side. Still, however, sat Peleg and Bildad, who were engaged at that time only in the fiercest of combats with the Marine Insurance Company; and a quantity of on-lookers, for the Nantucket Meeting House had many not of that denomination who attended out of interest. It was certainly this circumstance, which led to the remarkable events of this Meeting being anonymously bruited about; for no Friend would have so wrenched the seal from the cask of a private spiritual woe.
Well - was it really Starbuck, then, Ishmael? do ye observe him only in his coming-in and going-out, and connect that generalising report, of some one in the Meeting upon that day, so confidently upon that particular Starbuck? Yes, I do affirm it; I have a considerable support-beam of evidence, being the response of the Meeting itself.
For it was not as to some light-minded interloper, who might be thought to be playing the Neskayuna Shaker in a fit of fun. Certainly not! They received him with the earnest respect of those certain that the man before them was a proven Christian, who had in every circumstance they observed, conducted himself as one who should, for every idle word he spake, give account thereof in the day of judgement.
And let me add to this, that a five years' acquaintance is at least as good as a physiognomic study, for discovering the temper of a man. The arch is built; there remains the capstone; what else but this event can serve as it?
About forty minutes into the Meeting, then, it was and can only have been Starbuck who stood up very abruptly, as if hauled to attention, and without a word or sign gave forth an extraordinary and prolonged cry. It whistled through him; it was as though he was an Aeolian harp buffeted on all quarters, and vibrating contrariwise upon himself. He half-sat and half-fell down.
The Friend beside him, who had at the tip of his tongue some words as to the dissenting movement of Elias Hicks being a horrendous leviathan, a monster of human reason and human wisdom, spoke instead so pressingly, so beseechingly, of the near presence of the Lord, to melt our hearts in mercy, that many there were reduced to tears.
All pressed Starbuck's hand; embraced him; and Peleg and Bildad, who had had an interview with Ahab with the stern intention, of advising him against such a lengthy and unprofitable voyage in future, spoke very feelingly to Starbuck of the impossibility of his former situation.
As for Mary, whose whole existence had been strangely interblended among these amphibious Quakers - from those sober and virtuous organisations to which she lent her part ashore, to those desperate and scarce explicable dramas her friends and kinfolk acted out at sea - as for that Mary, I affirm she received the entire unveiling of Starbuck's conscience with an understanding heart.
Footnote, you say, I demand an evidentiary footnote, Ishmael! Bring out your Black-letter, go to the archives of the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, take a sworn affidavit - on what grounds do you so bold-facedly state this to me? How is it that you should attempt to go peeping in at your first mate's windows, and omnisciently inquire upon a private domestic scene?
Well, reader, fortunately for myself I have resolved on making this the close of my entire narrative, so that I might very easily escape such provoking questions - but I shall not seize my paddle and set forth again without some parting word. Consider, that you might take a set of antipodean compasses and find two beings engaged in forms of worship that seem entirely alien to one another - and yet what heavenly sweetnesses, and what commingled absurdities, you might discover in the breast of each! And with that example in mind, examine to yourself the peculiar and universal congenialities of the married state.