- char_end
- 1028909
- char_start
- 1020930
- chunk_index
- 144
- chunk_total
- 178
- estimated_tokens
- 1995
- source_file_key
- moby-dick
- text
- speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead.
Captain Peleg’s bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means
adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab’s deeper part, every
revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory
light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least.
That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And
not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore,
who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach
to him; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty—remaining, as it
did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab—invested itself with terrors, not
entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that,
through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them
lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it
was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it
transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.
But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,
or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not
with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took
plain practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.
And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without
delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him
supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which
had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful
selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured.
This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that
night; and to provide all the fittings for it, independent of those
pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship’s forge was
ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and,
to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at
once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of
the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate;
hence, he now comes in person on this stage.
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,
alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his
own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk
of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with
wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of
the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly
efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually
recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in
uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in
ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the
shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new
tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more
directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover
unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both
useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:
the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and
straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage
strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of
right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter
makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the
carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars
to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his
big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the
constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the
carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out
pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there;
but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded
operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter
signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he
deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But
while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with
such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue
some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For
nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal
stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the
surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general
stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while
pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace,
and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was
this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an
all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an
old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked
now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have
served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded
forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a
life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had
gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small
outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a
stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born
babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.
You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him
involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did
not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he
had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or
uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal
process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one,
must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was
like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, _multum in
parvo_, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little
swelled—of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of
various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls,
pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted
to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open
that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him
up by the legs, and there they were.
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a
common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously
did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few
drops of hartshorn, there is no telling.