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- text
- squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off
Cape Horn.”
“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing
close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you
tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask,
for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into
death’s jaws?”
“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I
should like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face
foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind
that!”
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement
of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings
in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of
common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the
superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign
my life into the hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow
who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of
scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that
the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be
imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a
squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for
his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to
this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in
what a devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking
all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make
a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, “come along, you shall be
my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at
their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world
more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical
life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded
upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled
away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as
good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a
supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might
be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.
I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a
clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
devil fetch the hindmost.
CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg
you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole
with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask.
“If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.
That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other
left, you know.”
“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it
is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active
perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in
their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried
into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that
with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed
man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the
joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of
his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of
the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving
his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually
apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for
Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s
crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s
crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.
Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that
matter. Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little
foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of
port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his
own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is
running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it
is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing
the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was
observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee
fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the
carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a
little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and
curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this
particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to
the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his
intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition
did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew
being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of
whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,
oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin
to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
excitement in the forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a
muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like
this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be
linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort
of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even
authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an
indifferent air concerning Fedallah.