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CHAPTER 100

Leg and Arm.

The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.


"Ship, ahoy!  Hast seen the White Whale?"

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours,
bearing down under the stern.  Trumpet to mouth, the old man was
standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed
to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own
boat's bow.  He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured,
fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious
roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and
one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered
arm of a hussar's surcoat.

"Hast seen the White Whale!"

"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden
it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a
wooden head like a mallet.

"Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars
near him--"Stand by to lower!"

In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the
stranger.  But here a curious difficulty presented itself.  In the
excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of
his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but
his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy
mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be
rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's warning.  Now,
it is no very easy matter for anybody--except those who are almost
hourly used to it, like whalemen--to clamber up a ship's side from a
boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up
towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down
to the kelson.  So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of
course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab
now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again;
hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope
to attain.

It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab.
And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of
the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him
a pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not
seem to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a
cripple to use their sea bannisters.  But this awkwardness only
lasted a minute, because the strange captain, observing at a glance
how affairs stood, cried out, "I see, I see!--avast heaving there!
Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle."

As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or
two previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive
curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the
end.  This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it
all, slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like
sitting in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree),
and then giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time
also helped to hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon
one of the running parts of the tackle.  Soon he was carefully swung
inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head.
With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain
advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory
arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, "Aye,
aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!--an arm and a leg!--an arm
that never can shrink, d'ye see; and a leg that never can run.  Where
did'st thou see the White Whale?--how long ago?"

"The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm
towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had
been a telescope; "there I saw him, on the Line, last season."

"And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding down from
the capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so.

"Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"

"Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"

"It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,"
began the Englishman.  "I was ignorant of the White Whale at that
time.  Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and
my boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too,
that went milling and milling round so, that my boat's crew could
only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale.
Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great
whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and
wrinkles."

"It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his
suspended breath.

"And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin."

"Aye, aye--they were mine--MY irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--"but
on!"

"Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly.
"Well, this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs
all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my
fast-line!

"Aye, I see!--wanted to part it; free the fast-fish--an old trick--I
know him."

"How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander, "I do not
know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there
somehow; but we didn't know it then; so that when we afterwards
pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of
the other whale's; that went off to windward, all fluking.  Seeing
how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was--the noblest
and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life--I resolved to capture him,
spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in.  And thinking the
hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to
might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a
whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first mate's
boat--Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way, Captain--Mounttop;
Mounttop--the captain);--as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's
boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and
snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.
But, Lord, look you, sir--hearts and souls alive, man--the next
instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both eyes out--all befogged
and bedeadened with black foam--the whale's tail looming straight up
out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple.  No use
sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding
sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second
iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the tail like a Lima tower,
cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes
first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all
chips.  We all struck out.  To escape his terrible flailings, I
seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment
clung to that like a sucking fish.  But a combing sea dashed me off,
and at the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards,
went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron
towing along near me caught me here" (clapping his hand just below
his shoulder); "yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to
Hell's flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the
good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh--clear along the
whole length of my arm--came out nigh my wrist, and up I
floated;--and that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the
way, captain--Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon: Bunger, my lad,--the
captain).  Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn."

The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all
the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote
his gentlemanly rank on board.  His face was an exceedingly round but
sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and
patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention
between a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in
the other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs
of the two crippled captains.  But, at his superior's introduction of
him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his
captain's bidding.

"It was a shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon; "and, taking
my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy--"

"Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the one-armed
captain, addressing Ahab; "go on, boy."

"Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing
hot weather there on the Line.  But it was no use--I did all I could;
sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of
diet--"

"Oh, very severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly
altering his voice, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night,
till he couldn't see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed,
half seas over, about three o'clock in the morning.  Oh, ye stars! he
sat up with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet.  Oh! a great
watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you
dog, laugh out! why don't ye?  You know you're a precious jolly
rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept
alive by any other man."

"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--said
the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab--"is
apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that
sort.  But I may as well say--en passant, as the French remark--that
I myself--that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend
clergy--am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink--"

"Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits
to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on--go on
with the arm story."

"Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly.  "I was about
observing, sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that
spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse
and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon
ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long.  I measured it
with the lead line.  In short, it grew black; I knew what was
threatened, and off it came.  But I had no hand in shipping that
ivory arm there; that thing is against all rule"--pointing at it with
the marlingspike--"that is the captain's work, not mine; he ordered
the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the
end, to knock some one's brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine
once.  He flies into diabolical passions sometimes.  Do ye see this
dent, sir"--removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and
exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the
slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a
wound--"Well, the captain there will tell you how that came here;
he knows."

"No, I don't," said the captain, "but his mother did; he was born
with it.  Oh, you solemn rogue, you--you Bunger! was there ever such
another Bunger in the watery world?  Bunger, when you die, you ought
to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages,
you rascal."

"What became of the White Whale?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had
been impatiently listening to this by-play between the two
Englishmen.

"Oh!" cried the one-armed captain, "oh, yes!  Well; after he sounded,
we didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I
didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick,
till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard
about Moby Dick--as some call him--and then I knew it was he."

"Did'st thou cross his wake again?"

"Twice."

"But could not fasten?"

"Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough?  What should I do
without this other arm?  And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so
much as he swallows."

"Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for bait to
get the right.  Do you know, gentlemen"--very gravely and
mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession--"Do you know,
gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably
constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him
to completely digest even a man's arm?  And he knows it too.  So that
what you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness.
For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to
terrify by feints.  But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow,
formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow
jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest,
and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an
emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d'ye see.  No possible
way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into
his general bodily system.  Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick
enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the
privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that case
the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you
shortly, that's all."

"No, thank ye, Bunger," said the English Captain, "he's welcome to
the arm he has, since I can't help it, and didn't know him then; but
not to another one.  No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for
him once, and that has satisfied me.  There would be great glory in
killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm
in him, but, hark ye, he's best let alone; don't you think so,
Captain?"--glancing at the ivory leg.

"He is.  But he will still be hunted, for all that.  What is best let
alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.  He's
all a magnet!  How long since thou saw'st him last?  Which way
heading?"

"Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly
walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; "this man's
blood--bring the thermometer!--it's at the boiling point!--his pulse
makes these planks beat!--sir!"--taking a lancet from his pocket, and
drawing near to Ahab's arm.

"Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks--"Man the
boat!  Which way heading?"

"Good God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
"What's the matter?  He was heading east, I think.--Is your Captain
crazy?" whispering Fedallah.

But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to
take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle
towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower.

In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men
were springing to their oars.  In vain the English Captain hailed
him.  With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to
his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.



CHAPTER 101

The Decanter.


Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she
hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of
Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes
not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in
point of real historical interest.  How long, prior to the year of
our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous
fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted
out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm
Whale; though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our
valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large
fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South
Atlantic: not elsewhere.  Be it distinctly recorded here, that the
Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized
steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were
the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.

In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape
Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of
any sort in the great South Sea.  The voyage was a skilful and lucky
one; and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious
sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English
and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific
were thrown open.  But not content with this good deed, the
indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his
Sons--how many, their mother only knows--and under their immediate
auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British
government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling
voyage of discovery into the South Sea.  Commanded by a naval
Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some
service; how much does not appear.  But this is not all.  In 1819,
the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go
on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan.  That ship--well
called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus
that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known.
The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a
Nantucketer.

All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists
to the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long
ago have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other
world.

The ship named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very fast
sailer and a noble craft every way.  I boarded her once at midnight
somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
forecastle.  It was a fine gam we had, and they were all
trumps--every soul on board.  A short life to them, and a jolly
death.  And that fine gam I had--long, very long after old Ahab
touched her planks with his ivory heel--it minds me of the noble,
solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship; and may my parson forget me,
and the devil remember me, if I ever lose sight of it.  Flip?  Did I
say we had flip?  Yes, and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons
the hour; and when the squall came (for it's squally off there by
Patagonia), and all hands--visitors and all--were called to reef
topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft
in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into
the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a
warning example to all drunken tars.  However, the masts did not go
overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to
pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the
forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my
taste.

The beef was fine--tough, but with body in it.  They said it was
bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
certain, how that was.  They had dumplings too; small, but
substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings.  I
fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after
they were swallowed.  If you stooped over too far forward, you risked
their pitching out of you like billiard-balls.  The bread--but that
couldn't be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the
bread contained the only fresh fare they had.  But the forecastle was
not very light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner
when you ate it.  But all in all, taking her from truck to helm,
considering the dimensions of the cook's boilers, including his own
live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a
jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack
fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.

But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
English whalers I know of--not all though--were such famous,
hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the
can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking,
and laughing?  I will tell you.  The abounding good cheer of these
English whalers is matter for historical research.  Nor have I been
at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed
needed.

The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant
in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,
touching plenty to eat and drink.  For, as a general thing, the
English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English
whaler.  Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is
not normal and natural, but incidental and particular; and,
therefore, must have some special origin, which is here pointed out,
and will be still further elucidated.

During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew
must be about whalers.  The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I
concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper.  I
was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production
of one "Fitz Swackhammer."  But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very
learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of
Santa Claus and St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for
translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble--this
same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that "Dan
Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper," but "The Merchant."  In short,
this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of
Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting
account of its whale fishery.  And in this chapter it was, headed,
"Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a long detailed list of the outfits
for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which
list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:

400,000 lbs. of beef.
60,000 lbs. Friesland pork.
150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
550,000 lbs. of biscuit.
72,000 lbs. of soft bread.
2,800 firkins of butter.
20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article).
550 ankers of Geneva.
10,800 barrels of beer.

Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole
pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.

At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all
this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and
Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary
tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc.,
consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and
Spitzbergen whale fishery.  In the first place, the amount of butter,
and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing.  I impute it,
though, to their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still
more unctuous by the nature of their vocation, and especially by
their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very
coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial natives pledge
each other in bumpers of train oil.

The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels.  Now,
as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer
of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch
whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea,
did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each
of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all;
therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for
a twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that
550 ankers of gin.  Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so
fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of
men to stand up in a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales;
this would seem somewhat improbable.  Yet they did aim at them, and
hit them too.  But this was very far North, be it remembered, where
beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our
southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at
the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to
Nantucket and New Bedford.

But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers
of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
whalers have not neglected so excellent an example.  For, say they,
when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of
the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.  And this empties
the decanter.



CHAPTER 102

A Bower in the Arsacides.


Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have
chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and
in detail upon some few interior structural features.  But to a large
and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to
unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his hose,
unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of
the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his
ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton.

But how now, Ishmael?  How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the
fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the
whale?  Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver
lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass,
hold up a specimen rib for exhibition?  Explain thyself, Ishmael.
Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a
cook dishes a roast-pig?  Surely not.  A veritable witness have you
hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege
of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and
beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making
up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats,
dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.

I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been
blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature.  In a ship I
belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the
deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the
harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.  Think you I let that
chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking
the seal and reading all the contents of that young cub?

And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am
indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of
the Arsacides.  For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the
trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the
Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm
villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far distant from what our
sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.

Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being
gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had
brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious
of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful
devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic
canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with
his head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted
droopings seemed his verdant jet.  When the vast body had at last
been stripped of its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become
dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up
the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered
it.

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the
priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic
head again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a
bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like
the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.

It was a wondrous sight.  The wood was green as mosses of the Icy
Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the
industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous
carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and
woof, and the living flowers the figures.  All the trees, with all
their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the
message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active.  Through the
lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving
the unwearied verdure.  Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one
word!--whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore
all these ceaseless toilings?  Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!--but
one single word with thee!  Nay--the shuttle flies--the figures float
from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides
away.  The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened,
that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look
on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear
the thousand voices that speak through it.  For even so it is in all
material factories.  The spoken words that are inaudible among the
flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the
walls, bursting from the opened casements.  Thereby have villainies
been detected.  Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din
of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard
afar.

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic idler!
Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed
around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all
woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher
verdure; but himself a skeleton.  Life folded Death; Death trellised
Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him
curly-headed glories.

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw
the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the
real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel
as an object of vertu.  He laughed.  But more I marvelled that the
priests should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine.  To and fro I
paced before this skeleton--brushed the vines aside--broke through
the ribs--and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long
amid its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours.  But soon my
line was out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I
entered.  I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.

Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the
skeleton.  From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived
me taking the altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they shouted;
"Dar'st thou measure this our god!  That's for us."  "Aye,
priests--well, how long do ye make him, then?"  But hereupon a fierce
contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked
each other's sconces with their yard-sticks--the great skull
echoed--and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own
admeasurements.

These admeasurements I now propose to set before you.  But first, be
it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
measurement I please.  Because there are skeleton authorities you
can refer to, to test my accuracy.  There is a Leviathanic Museum,
they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that
country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other
whales.  Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in
New Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call "the only perfect
specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States."
Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name,
a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton
of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown
magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.

In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons
belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
grounds.  King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir
Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts.  Sir
Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a
great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony
cavities--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan--and swing all day
upon his lower jaw.  Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors
and shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a
bunch of keys at his side.  Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence
for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence
to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for
the unrivalled view from his forehead.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of
preserving such valuable statistics.  But as I was crowded for space,
and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a
poem I was then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might
remain--I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed,
should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the
whale.



CHAPTER 103

Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton.


In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton
we are briefly to exhibit.  Such a statement may prove useful here.

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly
base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the
largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to
my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest
magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and
something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a
whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen
men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population
of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to
this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's
imagination?

Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,
jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now
simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his
unobstructed bones.  But as the colossal skull embraces so very large
a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far
the most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated
concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your
mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a
complete notion of the general structure we are about to view.

In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
Feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have
been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one
fifth in length compared with the living body.  Of this seventy-two
feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some
fifty feet of plain back-bone.  Attached to this back-bone, for
something less than a third of its length, was the mighty circular
basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals.

To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled
the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some
twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise,
for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.

The ribs were ten on a side.  The first, to begin from the neck, was
nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each
successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one
of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches.  From
that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last
only spanned five feet and some inches.  In general thickness, they
all bore a seemly correspondence to their length.  The middle ribs
were the most arched.  In some of the Arsacides they are used for
beams whereon to lay footpath bridges over small streams.

In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton
of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form.  The
largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that
part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in depth.  Now, the
greatest depth of the invested body of this particular whale must
have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib
measured but little more than eight feet.  So that this rib only
conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that
part.  Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all
that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh,
muscle, blood, and bowels.  Still more, for the ample fins, I here
saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and
majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to
try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over
his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.  No.
Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings
of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the
fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.

But the spine.  For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a
crane, to pile its bones high up on end.  No speedy enterprise.  But
now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.

There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are
not locked together.  They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks
on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry.  The
largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet,
and in depth more than four.  The smallest, where the spine tapers
away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something
like a white billiard-ball.  I was told that there were still smaller
ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the
priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with.  Thus we
see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off
at last into simple child's play.



CHAPTER 104

The Fossil Whale.


From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon
to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate.  Would you, you could
not compress him.  By good rights he should only be treated of in
imperial folio.  Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to
tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the
gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like
great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck
of a line-of-battle-ship.

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me
to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not
overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him
out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.  Having already described
him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities,
it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous,
and antediluvian point of view.  Applied to any other creature than
the Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--such portly terms might justly be
deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent.  But when Leviathan is the text,
the case is altered.  Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under
the weightiest words of the dictionary.  And here be it said, that
whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these
dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of
Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous
lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a
lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,
though it may seem but an ordinary one.  How, then, with me, writing
of this Leviathan?  Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
capitals.  Give me a condor's quill!  Give me Vesuvius' crater for an
inkstand!  Friends, hold my arms!  For in the mere act of penning my
thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with
their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the
whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and
men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the
revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole
universe, not excluding its suburbs.  Such, and so magnifying, is the
virtue of a large and liberal theme!  We expand to its bulk.  To
produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.  No great and
enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be
who have tried it.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my
credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time
I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches,
canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.
Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that
while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of
monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics
discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the
connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the
antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to
have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered
belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the
superficial formations.  And though none of them precisely answer to
any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently akin
to them in general respects, to justify their taking rank as
Cetacean fossils.

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their
bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various
intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in
France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana,
Mississippi, and Alabama.  Among the more curious of such remains is
part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue
Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the
palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the
great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time.  Cuvier pronounced these
fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic
species.

But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842,
on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama.  The awe-stricken
credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the
fallen angels.  The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and
bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus.  But some specimen bones
of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it
turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a
departed species.  A significant illustration of the fact, again and
again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes
but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body.  So Owen
rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the
London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the
most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have
blotted out of existence.

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances
to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing
on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back
to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun;
for time began with man.  Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and
I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when
wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics;
and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an
inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible.  Then the whole world
was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the
present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs.  Who can show a
pedigree like Leviathan?  Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than
the Pharaoh's.  Methuselah seems a school-boy.  I look round to shake
hands with Shem.  I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced
existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been
before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.

But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to
claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the
unmistakable print of his fin.  In an apartment of the great temple
of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the
granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in
centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures
on the celestial globe of the moderns.  Gliding among them, old
Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere,
centuries before Solomon was cradled.

Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the
antiquity of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as
set down by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.

"Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore.  The Common People imagine,
that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the temple, no Whale can
pass it without immediate death.  But the truth of the Matter is,
that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two
Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em.
They keep a Whale's Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which
lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch,
the Head of which cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back.
This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years
before I saw it.  Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who
prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do not stand
to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the
Base of the Temple."

In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be
a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.



CHAPTER 105

Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?--Will He Perish?


Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from
the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,
in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from
the original bulk of his sires.

But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its
earlier ones.

Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than
seventy feet in length in the skeleton.  Whereas, we have already
seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton
of a large sized modern whale.  And I have heard, on whalemen's
authority, that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet
long at the time of capture.

But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods;
may it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?

Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of
such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally.  For
Pliny tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and
Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in
length--Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!  And even in the
days of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish
member of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales
(reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards;
that is, three hundred and sixty feet.  And Lacepede, the French
naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning
of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred
metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet.  And this work was
published so late as A.D. 1825.

But will any whaleman believe these stories?  No.  The whale of
to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time.  And if ever I go
where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to
tell him so.  Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the
Egyptian mummies that were buried thousands of years before even
Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern
Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and other animals
sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the
relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as plainly prove
that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only
equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's fat kine;
in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals the
whale alone should have degenerated.

But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
recondite Nantucketers.  Whether owing to the almost omniscient
look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even
through Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and
lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted
along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan
can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether
he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last
whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself
evaporate in the final puff.

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of
buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands
the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and
scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous
river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a
dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would
seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape
speedy extinction.

But you must look at this matter in every light.  Though so short a
period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the buffalo in
Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the
present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region;
and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of
man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily
forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan.  Forty men in one ship
hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they have done
extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of
forty fish.  Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian
hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset
suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of
moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse
instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty
thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be
statistically stated.

Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the
gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former
years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in
small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in
consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much
more remunerative.  Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those
whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in
immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries,
yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into
vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies.  That is all.  And
equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called
whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years
abounding with them, hence that species also is declining.  For they
are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no
longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and
remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar
spectacle.

Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have
two firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever
remain impregnable.  And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the
frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the
savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at
last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate
glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes;
and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all
pursuit from man.

But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that
this positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their
battalions.  But though for some time past a number of these whales,
not less than 13,000, have been annually slain on the nor'-west
coast by the Americans alone; yet there are considerations which
render even this circumstance of little or no account as an opposing
argument in this matter.

Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the
populousness of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what
shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at
one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those
regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate
climes.  And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants,
which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by
Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the
East--if they still survive there in great numbers, much more may the
great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate
in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas,
Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea
combined.

Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity
of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,
therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult
generations must be contemporary.  And what that is, we may soon
gain some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and
family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men,
women, and children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding
this countless host to the present human population of the globe.

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
species, however perishable in his individuality.  He swam the seas
before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the
Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin.  In Noah's flood he
despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded,
like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale
will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the
equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.



CHAPTER 106

Ahab's Leg.


The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence
to his own person.  He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of
his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock.
And when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he
so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman
(it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly
enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional
twist and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all
appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.

And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to
the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood.  For it
had not been very long prior to the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket,
that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and
insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable
casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it
had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it
without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely
cured.

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that
all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct
issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the
most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as
inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with
every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like.
Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and
posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain
canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have
no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary,
shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair;
whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to
themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the
grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in
the deeper analysis of the thing.  For, thought Ahab, while even the
highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness
lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic
significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their
diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction.  To trail the
genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among
the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of
all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round
harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods
themselves are not for ever glad.  The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark
in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
properly, in set way, have been disclosed before.  With many other
particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to
some, why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after
the sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such
Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought
speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead.
Captain Peleg's bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means
adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every
revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory
light.  But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at
least.  That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary
recluseness.  And not only this, but to that ever-contracting,
dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed the privilege
of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the above
hinted casualty--remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by
Ahab--invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the
land of spirits and of wails.  So that, through their zeal for him,
they had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the
knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till
a considerable interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the
Pequod's decks.

But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the
air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or
not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he
took plain practical procedures;--he called the carpenter.

And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without
delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him
supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale)
which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a
careful selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be
secured.  This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg
completed that night; and to provide all the fittings for it,
independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use.
Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its
temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the affair, the
blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the forging of
whatever iron contrivances might be needed.

}
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