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- to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell
eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be
blameworthy?
It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even
modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their
functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called,
and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt,
precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is
solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be,
though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run
well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here,
concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in
common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints
his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man
who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a
quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to
much in his totality.
But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is
used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar
oil, nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil.
What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured,
unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and
queens with coronation stuff!
CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an
icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being
hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood
would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time
of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which
his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those
summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties
and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was
merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking;
quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and
closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength,
like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for
long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow
or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was
warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed
to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he
had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life
for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame
chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there
were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some
cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly
conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence,
the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline
him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some
organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than
from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And
if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more
did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child,
tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature,
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