- char_end
- 965861
- char_start
- 958062
- chunk_index
- 135
- chunk_total
- 178
- estimated_tokens
- 1950
- source_file_key
- moby-dick
- text
-
“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind,
poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
“Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
“Well, that’s funny.”
“And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a
crow, especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw!
caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There
he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more
poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.”
“Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could go hang
myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can stand
the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my
sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”
“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire
to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence?
Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s
nailed to the mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old
Ahab! the White Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father,
in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver
ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding ring. How did it get
there? And so they’ll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish
up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters
for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the
green miser’ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes ’mong the worlds
blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey,
hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!”
CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.
“Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”
So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours,
bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was
standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to
the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat’s
bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of
sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round
him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket
streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden
head like a mallet.
“Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
him—“Stand by to lower!”
In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the
stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the
excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his
leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his
own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical
contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and
shipped in any other vessel at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very
easy matter for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it,
like whalemen—to clamber up a ship’s side from a boat on the open sea;
for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks,
and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So,
deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether
unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly
reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain
changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.
It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And
in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the
two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a
pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem
to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to
use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute,
because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood,
cried out, “I see, I see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing
over the cutting-tackle.”
As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive
curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end.
This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all,
slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting
in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then
giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to
hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running
parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high
bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm
frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab,
putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two
sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let
us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can
shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did’st thou see
the White Whale?—how long ago?”
“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
telescope; “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.”
“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from
the capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.
“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”
“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”
“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,”
began the Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.
Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat
fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went
milling and milling round so, that my boat’s crew could only trim dish,
by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches
from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white
head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”
“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
breath.
“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”
“Aye, aye—they were mine—_my_ irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but on!”
“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly. “Well,
this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all
afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick—I know
him.”
“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not
know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there
somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled
on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other
whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters
stood, and what a noble great whale it was—the noblest and biggest I
ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the
boiling rage he seemed to be in.