Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  Chapter III. Elija Black

  Then there is the modern Hercules, far-seeing augur in the Mexican-American-Zomby wars, Elija Black; Lakota warrior-prophet of much renown, and with whom Ishmael is intimately united as a blood brother, for we fought back to back against the great horde in the now-famous victory of that war, that battle at the fording of the Rappahannock River in the dark Virginian woods of Warrenton; there it was that Elija and I became as brothers when corpses lay in sullen heaps all around us ere the trembling end of that long day and longer night. He it was who envisioned this voyage and bid me take it, once my other sordid duties had been settled.

  Chapter IV. Vishnoo

  It should be known that not only heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the zomby hunter, for is not his mace named Kaumodaki, that monarch of zomby weapons–gripped by one of his four arms?; said mace being a symbol of Vishnoo’s power to destroy the demoniac; and in another arm does not Vishnoo wield the potent sharp-spinning Sudarshana, so alike to the Militia’s sharp lance (and the whaler’s) as to be the same weapon?

  And in what might be no small coincidence, when Brahma, or the God of Gods, the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo—the hunter of zombies both physical and mental—to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the Creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo not only a hunter of zombies, but a whaleman, too? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?

  Perseus, Hercules, Elija Black and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you! What club but the zomby hunter’s can head off like that? In truth, perhaps the only club that can compare is that club that now surrounds me: that of the sperm whale fishermen.

  Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my Zombological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draft—nay, but the draft of a draft. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

  Chapter

  The Shark Massacre

  When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious and noisy one, not soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well.

  But sometimes, especially upon The Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcass, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one hugely rotten zomby eye-socket, and those sharks the maggots in it.

  Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and I came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, we darted our long whaling-spades, and thereby kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks,[1] by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part, as the zomby. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, we marksmen could not always hit our mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe.

  [1]The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.

  A similar implement I have seen used to great advantage against a zomby: its pole is foreshortened to a more manageable four to six feet, and in addition to the large blade of the whaling spade, it has a smaller blade affixed to the other end of the haft, called a “convenience spade” by him who wielded it, one Quay Chang, who, with incredible grace, used this cutting-spade-like weapon as though dancing. For now, Quay Chang must wait in the wings.

  The sharks viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Ah, ye self-devouring sharks how alike ye are to both time and man’s sharkish mind!

  So, with spade in hand I smote sharks for hour upon hour, the sweat in freshets down my chest and slithering rivulets down my back and ere long a familiar blackness overtook me, though not so black as before, and I welcomed it as one would a former lover and sank into its velvet envelopments. My shipmates stood somewhat in awe of me after that prodigious performance, and, upon seeing me uncommon good with the spade in this manner,[1] they bade Bulkington tell them more of my storied deeds ashore.

  [1]Though I had studied but a short time with Quay Chang, learning less than a teenth of a teenth of the shadow of his knowledge, yet still was I elevated far above the common in the use of a cutting spade; such was Quay Chang’s prodigious skill.

  At the conclusion of his story telling, Bulkington approached me to apologize for telling only of the tales he had since heard from others, and not telling of what he termed that event, saying that though it was in truth the only time he had seen me in battle with his own eyes, yet he could not bring himself to speak of it, for what he said were obvious reasons. This left me puzzled and long did I ponder the import of what his words implied. Some months later, the full story returned to me, and at the proper time, it shall be related. Though I knew not what he meant then, yet I understood his sentiment and did not press him further.

  Even so, I marveled and only half-believed the tales he had told, for though I lived them, if true, they were new to me; such was the black blankness surrounding me then. All such stories aside, slaughtering the zomby-like sharks gave me some small relief from the rage that had been buil
ding in the empty cavity of my chest, despite my hopes that this whaling voyage would banish such passions. Any wiser man could have told me they would not; in point of fact I had the strange presentiment then that, far from fleeing zomby influence, I somehow delved yet deeper, and would somehow go yet further than I had done before; and this filling me with no small sense of dread.

  Nor was this all regarding the sharks. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed, and here again can be seen the shark’s similarity to the zomby. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. Once fully dead, not even a zomby is so dangerous as the mouth a dead shark (but for the small matter of his contagion, of course, that being a silent, insidious thing in its beginning, if not its end).

  “Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down, spattering drops of crimson to the deck; “Wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made him shark must be one damn madman.”

  Chapter

  From

  Whale to Oil

  Stubb’s whale was killed Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath-breaking are all whalemen. The lovely ivory Pequod was turned abattoir; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.

  In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles comprised a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached.

  And now suspended in rope-rigged stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. A broad, semicircular line is then cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber.

  As the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.

  One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon often among the Militia, called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance, the harpooneer dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows.

  This accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction.

  I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learnéd naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion. The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.

  Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature’s skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale’s body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.

  Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.

  In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, some of them circular, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hierogl
yphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connection. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.

  This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect, and some of them circular, as the toothy suckers of the giant squid. It seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with the Kraken; reasoning thus, I hereby dub them Kracken Tracks.

  A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo babe in summer.