- end_line
- 2072
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.270Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 2000
- text
- have staked my life on it, that he seized the right meaning of
Montaigne. I saw that he was an earnest thinker; I more than suspected
that he had been bolted in the mill of adversity. For all these things,
my heart yearned toward him; I determined to know him.
At last I succeeded; it was during a profoundly quiet midnight watch,
when I perceived him walking alone in the waist, while most of the men
were dozing on the carronade-slides.
That night we scoured all the prairies of reading; dived into the
bosoms of authors, and tore out their hearts; and that night
White-Jacket learned more than he has ever done in any single night
since.
The man was a marvel. He amazed me, as much as Coleridge did the
troopers among whom he enlisted. What could have induced such a man to
enter a man-of-war, all my sapience cannot fathom. And how he managed
to preserve his dignity, as he did, among such a rabble rout was
equally a mystery. For he was no sailor; as ignorant of a ship, indeed,
as a man from the sources of the Niger. Yet the officers respected him;
and the men were afraid of him. This much was observable, however, that
he faithfully discharged whatever special duties devolved upon him; and
was so fortunate as never to render himself liable to a reprimand.
Doubtless, he took the same view of the thing that another of the crew
did; and had early resolved, so to conduct himself as never to run the
risk of the scourge. And this it must have been—added to whatever
incommunicable grief which might have been his—that made this Nord such
a wandering recluse, even among our man-of-war mob. Nor could he have
long swung his hammock on board, ere he must have found that, to insure
his exemption from that thing which alone affrighted him, he must be
content for the most part to turn a man-hater, and socially expatriate
himself from many things, which might have rendered his situation more
tolerable. Still more, several events that took place must have
horrified him, at times, with the thought that, however he might
isolate and entomb himself, yet for all this, the improbability of his
being overtaken by what he most dreaded never advanced to the
infallibility of the impossible.
In my intercourse with Nord, he never made allusion to his past
career—a subject upon which most high-bred castaways in a man-of-war
are very diffuse; relating their adventures at the gaming-table; the
recklessness with which they have run through the amplest fortunes in a
single season; their alms-givings, and gratuities to porters and poor
relations; and above all, their youthful indiscretions, and the
broken-hearted ladies they have left behind. No such tales had Nord to
tell. Concerning the past, he was barred and locked up like the specie
vaults of the Bank of England. For anything that dropped from him, none
of us could be sure that he had ever existed till now. Altogether, he
was a remarkable man.
My other friend, Williams, was a thorough-going Yankee from Maine, who
had been both a peddler and a pedagogue in his day. He had all manner
of stories to tell about nice little country frolics, and would run
over an endless list of his sweethearts. He was honest, acute, witty,
full of mirth and good humour—a laughing philosopher. He was invaluable
as a pill against the spleen; and, with the view of extending the
advantages of his society to the saturnine Nord, I introduced them to
each other; but Nord cut him dead the very same evening, when we
sallied out from between the guns for a walk on the main-deck.
CHAPTER XIV.
A DRAUGHT IN A MAN-OF-WAR.
We were not many days out of port, when a rumour was set afloat that
dreadfully alarmed many tars. It was this: that, owing to some
unprecedented oversight in the Purser, or some equally unprecedented
remissness in the Naval-storekeeper at Callao, the frigate’s supply of
that delectable beverage, called “grog,” was well-nigh expended.
- title
- Chunk 1