Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  CHAPTER 96

  The Try-Works

  Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguishedby her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solidmasonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship.It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transportedto her planks.

  The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast,the most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of apeculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almostsolid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square,and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck,but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderousknees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it downto the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at topcompletely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway.Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number,and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use,they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished withsoapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls.During the night-watches some cynical old sailors willcrawl into them and coil themselves away there for a nap.While employed in polishing them--one man in each pot, side by side--many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips.It is a place also for profound mathematical meditation.It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstonediligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struckby the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies glidingalong the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descendfrom any point in precisely the same time.

  Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works,the bare masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the twoiron mouths of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots.These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heatof the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck,by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entireinclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear,this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates.There are no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall.And here let us go back for a moment.

  It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod'stry-works were first started on this present voyage.It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.

  "All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook,fire the works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had beenthrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage.Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in thetry-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no woodis used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel.In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber,now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerableof its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames.Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope,once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horribleto inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you mustlive in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odorabout it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres.It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argumentfor the pit.

  By midnight the works were in full operation.We were clear from the carcass; sail had been made;the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense.But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which atintervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminatedevery lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissionedto some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigsof the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors,with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down uponthe Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.

  The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a widehearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartareanshapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers.With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber intothe scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snakyflames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet.The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the shipthere was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagernessto leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works,on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass.This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when nototherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire,till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features,now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards,and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these werestrangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their talesof terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughterforked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace;as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulatedwith their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on,and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastlyshot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the seaand the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth,and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod,freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse,and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the materialcounterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

  So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for longhours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea.Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the bettersaw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others.The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering halfin smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visionsin my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountabledrowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.

  But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep,I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong.The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in myears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind;I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of puttingmy fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them stillfurther apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compassbefore me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had beenwatching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then madeghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression,that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so muchbound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceitthat the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in mybrief sleep I had turned myself about, and was frontingthe ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the compass.In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vesselfrom flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her.How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnaturalhallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of beingbrought by the lee!

  Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dreamwith thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass;accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not theartificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly.To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright;those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the mornwill show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious,golden, glad sun, the only true lamp--all others but liars!

  Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp,nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all themillions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon.The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth,and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortalman who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal
mancannot be true--not true, or undeveloped. With books the same.The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truestof all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the finehammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilfulworld hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet.But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fastcrossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell;calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men;and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelaisas passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fittedto sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mouldwith unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

  But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out ofthe way of understanding shall remain" (i.e. even while living)"in the congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire,lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alikedive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them againand become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains;so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is stillhigher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.