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- Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland
Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage
homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling,
but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all
Islanders in the Pequod, _Isolatoes_ too, I call such, not
acknowledging the common continent of men, but each _Isolato_ living on
a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel,
what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from
all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying
Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar
from which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip—he
never did—oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim
Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine;
prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck
on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in
glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was
seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the
watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed
to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from
the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was
plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and
dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to
penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the
sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at
times by the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived
of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was
almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish
prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or
uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look
about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such
emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,
were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the
fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation
in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the
aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was
most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and
induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.
Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own
different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of
them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being
Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had
biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the
southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed,
gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable
weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey
and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the
ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping
and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of
the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the
taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension;
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