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- confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising forecast
of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather
good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in
all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection
of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little
relied upon Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to
carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances
produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and
accordingly prepared to set about this business with a determined
rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that
trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up
with Yojo in our little bedroom—for it seemed that it was some sort of
Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with
Queequeg and Yojo that day; _how_ it was I never could find out, for,
though I applied myself to it several times, I never could master his
liturgies and XXXIX Articles—leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his
tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his sacrificial fire of
shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After much prolonged
sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were three
ships up for three-years’ voyages—The Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the
Pequod. _Devil-Dam_, I do not know the origin of; _Tit-bit_ is obvious;
_Pequod_, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated
tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes. I
peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the
Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for
a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
know;—square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old
school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed
look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and
calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a
French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her
venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of
Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts
stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her
ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped
flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these
her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining
to the wild business that for more than half a century she had
followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he
commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one
of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term
of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and
inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device,
unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved buckler or
bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his
neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of
trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased
bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were
garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the
sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews
and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood,
but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile
wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller
was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her
hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest,
felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching
its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things
are touched with that.
Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having
authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at
first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of
tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It
seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical
shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber
black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the
right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of
these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at
the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved
to and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem’s head. A
triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the
insider commanded a complete view forward.
And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by
his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the
ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all
over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a
stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
constructed.
There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of
the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,
and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;
only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest
wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his
continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
windward;—for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
“Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” said I, advancing to the door of
the tent.
“Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of
him?” he demanded.
“I was thinking of shipping.”
“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer—ever been in a
stove boat?”
“No, Sir, I never have.”
“Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?
“Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been
several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that—”
“Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that
leg?—I’ll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of
the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose
now ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant
ships. But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?—it
looks a little suspicious, don’t it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast
thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of
murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?”
I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of
these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
Vineyard.
“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
shipping ye.”
“Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
“Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”
“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”
“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”
“I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.”
“Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to,
young man.