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CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
(_As told at the Golden Inn._)
The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet
more travellers than in any other part.
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned
almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us
strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White
Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s
story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain
wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of
God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter
circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may
be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never
reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of
the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the
private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of
whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of
secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and
revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could
not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did
this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full
knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were
they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among
themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’s main-mast.
Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as
publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now
proceed to put on lasting record.
*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once
narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one
saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden
Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were
on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they
occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.
“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward
from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according
to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold
than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But
the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good
luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to
quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous,
though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low
down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued
her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy
intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was
the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that
now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the
nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and
repaired.
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