Moby Dick; Or, The Whale
Page 101
CHAPTER 101
The Decanter
Ere the English ship fades from sight be it set down here, that shehailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling houseof enderby and sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion,comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons,in point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the yearof our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence,my numerous fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year(1775) it fitted out the first English ships that ever regularlyhunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years previous(ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucketand the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued the Leviathan,but only in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere.Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were the firstamong mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm Whale;and that for half a century they were the only people of the wholeglobe who so harpooned him.
In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly roundedCape Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boatof any sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilfuland lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold fullof the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followedby other ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whalegrounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content with thisgood deed, the indefatigable house again bestirred itself:Samuel and all his Sons--how many, their mother only knows--and undertheir immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense,the British government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattleron a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded bya naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it,and did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all.In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own,to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship--well called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise;and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first becamegenerally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commandedby a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think,exists to the present day; though doubtless the original Samuelmust long ago have slipped his cable for the great South Seaof the other world.
The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast sailerand a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight somewhereoff the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the forecastle.It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps--every soul on board.A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam I had--long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his ivory heel--it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship;and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I everlose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flippedit at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came(for it's squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands--visitors and all--were called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavythat we had to swing each other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantlyfurled the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there,reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars.However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down,so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage saltspray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much dilutedand pickled it for my taste.
The beef was fine--tough, but with body in it.They said it was bullbeef; others, that it was dromedary beef;but I do not know, for certain, how that was. They haddumplings too; small, but substantial, symmetrically globular,and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them,and roll them about in you after they were swallowed.If you stooped over too far forward, you risked theirpitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread--but that couldn't be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic,in short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had.But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very easyto step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all,taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensionsof the cook's boilers, including his own live parchment boilers;fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship;of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all,and capital from boot heels to hat-band.
But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some otherEnglish whalers I know of--not all though--were such famous,hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread,and the can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of eating,and drinking, and laughing? I will tell you. The abounding goodcheer of these English whalers is matter for historical research.Nor have I been at all sparing of historical whale research,when it has seemed needed.
The English were preceded in the whale fishery bythe Hollanders, Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derivedmany terms still extant in the fishery; and what is yet more,their fat old fashions, touching plenty to eat and drink.For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew;but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thingof whaling good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidentaland particular; and, therefore, must have some special origin,which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.
During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled uponan ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it,I knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman,"wherefore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirsof some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship mustcarry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeingthat it was the production of one "Fitz Swackhammer." But myfriend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutchand High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Potts,to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of spermcandles for his trouble--this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spiedthe book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper,"but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutchbook treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects,contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery.And in this chapter it was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that Ifound a long detailed list of the outfits for the lardersand cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list,as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
0084400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of butter. 20,000 lbs. of Texel and Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of beer.
Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading;not so in the present case, however, where the reader is floodedwith whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good ginand good cheer.
At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of allthis beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughtswere incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendentaland Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementarytables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, &c.,consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenlandand Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the first place, the amountof butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing.I impute it, though, to their naturally unctuous natures,being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their vocation,and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas,on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivialnatives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.
The quantity of the beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels.Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the shortsummer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutchwhalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea,did not much exceed three months, say,
and reckoning 30 mento each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamenin all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beerper man, for a twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fairproportion of that 550 ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin andbeer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been,were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat's head, and takegood aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat improbable.Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far North,be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution;upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to makethe harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat;and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutchwhalers of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and thatthe English whalers have not neglected so excellent an example.For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothingbetter out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.And this empties the decanter.
CHAPTER 102
A Bower in the Arsacides