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- 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 honor 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.
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