Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  CHAPTER 27

  Knights and Squires

  Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod;and hence, according to local usage, was called aCape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant;taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and whileengaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away,calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year.Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over hiswhaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner,and his crew all invited guests. He was as particularabout the comfortable arrangements of his part of the boat,as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box.When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight,he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as awhistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadigtunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster.Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of deathinto an easy chair. What he thought of death itself,there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all,might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mindthat way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor,he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft,and bestir themselves there, about something which he wouldfind out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.

  What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in aworld full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the ground with their packs;what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his;that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short,black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face.You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunkwithout his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipesthere ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand;and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession,lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loadingthem again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed,instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipeinto his mouth.

  I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least ofhis peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air,whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the namelessmiseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it;and as in time of the cholera, some people go about with acamphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against allmortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have operatedas a sort of disinfecting agent.

  The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard.A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,who somehow seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personallyand hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sortof point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvelsof their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anythinglike an apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them;that in his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was but a speciesof magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a littlecircumvention and some small application of time and trouble in orderto kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of hismade him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followedthese fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage roundCape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time.As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails;so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask was oneof the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long.They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form,he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that namein Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating sidetimbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icyconcussions of those battering seas.

  Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, were momentous men.They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod'sboats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahabwould probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these threeheadsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with theirlong keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers;even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.

  And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman,like a Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by hisboat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provideshim with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted,or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generallysubsists between the two, a close intimacy and friendliness;it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set downwho the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman eachof them belonged.

  First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate,had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.

  Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerlypromontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the lastremnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboringisland of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers.In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name ofGay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones,and black rounding eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness,but Antarctic in their glittering expression--all this sufficientlyproclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proudwarrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose,had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main.But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland,Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea;the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrowof the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs,you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlierPuritans and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Princeof the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate's squire.

  Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-blacknegro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold.Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailorscalled them ringbolts, and would talk of securing the top-sailhalyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shippedon board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast.And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket,and the pagan harbors most frequented by the whalemen; and havingnow led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the shipsof owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped;Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe,moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks.There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white manstanding before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was theSquire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him.As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said,that at the present day not one in two of the many thousandmen before the mast employed in the American whale fishery,are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with theAmerican army and military and merchant navies, and the engineeringforces employed in the construction of the American Canalsand Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these casesthe native American literally provides the brains, the restof the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small numberof these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outwardbound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crewsfrom the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner,the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in atthe 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 k
eel, 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 inthe Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar fromwhich 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!