- description
- # SKETCH SECOND. TWO SIDES TO A TORTOISE.
## Overview
This document is a section titled "SKETCH SECOND. TWO SIDES TO A TORTOISE." It is part of Herman Melville's "The Piazza Tales," specifically within the collection "The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles." The text was extracted from the file `the_piazza_tales.txt`.
## Context
This section is the second sketch in a series about the Galápagos Islands, following "SKETCH FIRST. THE ISLES AT LARGE." and preceding "SKETCH THIRD. ROCK RODONDO." It was extracted on January 30, 2026, as part of the larger "Melville Complete Works" collection. The text describes the author's observations and reflections on the tortoises of the Encantadas, contrasting their seemingly doomed, laborious existence with the eventual consumption of their flesh by sailors.
## Contents
The text details the arduous and seemingly pointless journeys of tortoises, who relentlessly push against obstacles. The author muses on their "drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world." He contrasts this with the eventual fate of three tortoises, whose shells are transformed into utilitarian objects like soup-tureens and salvers after they are eaten by sailors. The sketch explores themes of perseverance, futility, and the human relationship with nature, presenting a stark duality in the life and perceived purpose of these creatures.
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:59.285Z
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- description_title
- SKETCH SECOND. TWO SIDES TO A TORTOISE.
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- 6154
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- 2026-01-30T20:47:36.328Z
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- text
- As I lay in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow weary
draggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck.
Their stupidity or their resolution was so great, that they never went
aside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just
before the mid-watch. At sunrise I found him butted like a
battering-ram against the immovable foot of the foremast, and still
striving, tooth and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these
tortoises are the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a
downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in
that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses
them. I have known them in their journeyings ram themselves heroically
against rocks, and long abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in
order to displace them, and so hold on their inflexible path. Their
crowning curse is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a
belittered world.
Meeting with no such hinderance as their companion did, the other
tortoises merely fell foul of small stumbling-blocks—buckets, blocks,
and coils of rigging—and at times in the act of crawling over them
would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these
draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they
came; an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly
into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles
with inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three
straight-forward monsters, century after century, writhing through the
shades, grim as blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously, that
not only did toad-stools and all fungus things grow beneath their feet,
but a sooty moss sprouted upon their backs. With them I lost myself in
volcanic mazes; brushed away endless boughs of rotting thickets; till
finally in a dream I found myself sitting crosslegged upon the
foremost, a Brahmin similarly mounted upon either side, forming a
tripod of foreheads which upheld the universal cope.
Such was the wild nightmare begot by my first impression of the
Encantadas tortoise. But next evening, strange to say, I sat down with
my shipmates, and made a merry repast from tortoise steaks, and
tortoise stews; and supper over, out knife, and helped convert the
three mighty concave shells into three fanciful soup-tureens, and
polished the three flat yellowish calipees into three gorgeous salvers.
- title
- SKETCH SECOND. TWO SIDES TO A TORTOISE.