Moby Segment

Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago--never mind how long
precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing
particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a
little and see the watery part of the world.  It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.  Whenever I
find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,
drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily
pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every
funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper
hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me
from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon
as I can.  This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a
philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly
take to the ship.  There is nothing surprising in this.  If they but
knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish
very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with
her surf.  Right and left, the streets take you waterward.  Its
extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by
waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of
sight of land.  Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.  Go from
Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall,
northward.  What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around
the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean
reveries.  Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the
pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some
high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better
seaward peep.  But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in
lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to
desks.  How then is this?  Are the green fields gone?  What do they
here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
seemingly bound for a dive.  Strange!  Nothing will content them but
the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of
yonder warehouses will not suffice.  No.  They must get just as nigh
the water as they possibly can without falling in.  And there they
stand--miles of them--leagues.  Inlanders all, they come from lanes
and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west.  Yet
here they all unite.  Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the
needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more.  Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes.
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down
in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.  There is
magic in it.  Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his
deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going,
and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all
that region.  Should you ever be athirst in the great American
desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied
with a metaphysical professor.  Yes, as every one knows, meditation
and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist.  He desires to paint you the dreamiest,
shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all
the valley of the Saco.  What is the chief element he employs?  There
stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a
crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his
cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.  Deep into
distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of
mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.  But though the picture
lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs
like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.  Go visit
the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade
knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm
wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there!  Were Niagara
but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see
it?  Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two
handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he
sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway
Beach?  Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy
soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?  Why upon your
first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical
vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of
sight of land?  Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?  Why did
the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?  Surely
all this is not without meaning.  And still deeper the meaning of
that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the
tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and
was drowned.  But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and
oceans.  It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this
is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I
begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of
my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as
a passenger.  For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse,
and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.  Besides,
passengers get sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do
not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a
passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea
as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.  I abandon the glory and
distinction of such offices to those who like them.  For my part, I
abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations
of every kind whatsoever.  It is quite as much as I can do to take
care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs,
schooners, and what not.  And as for going as cook,--though I confess
there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer
on ship-board--yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;--though
once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and
peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to
say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.  It is out of the
idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted
river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their
huge bake-houses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow.  And at first, this sort of
thing is unpleasant enough.  It touches one's sense of honour,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land,
the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.  And more than
all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have
been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys
stand in awe of you.  The transition is a keen one, I assure you,
from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of
Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.  But even
this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a
broom and sweep down the decks?  What does that indignity amount to,
weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?  Do you think
the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I
promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular
instance?  Who ain't a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, however the
old sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch
me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right;
that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same
way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and
so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each
other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single
penny that I ever heard of.  On the contrary, passengers themselves
must pay.  And there is all the difference in the world between
paying and being paid.  The act of paying is perhaps the most
uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon
us.  But BEING PAID,--what will compare with it?  The urbane activity
with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering
that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly
ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.  Ah! how
cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome
exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck.  For as in this world,
head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if
you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the
Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from
the sailors on the forecastle.  He thinks he breathes it first; but
not so.  In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in
many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect
it.  But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea
as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a
whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who
has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and
influences me in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than
any one else.  And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage,
formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a
long time ago.  It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo
between more extensive performances.  I take it that this part of the
bill must have run something like this:


"GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."


Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers,
the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when
others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and
short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in
farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I
recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the
springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under
various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did,
besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting
from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great
whale himself.  Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all
my curiosity.  Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his
island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these,
with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and
sounds, helped to sway me to my wish.  With other men, perhaps, such
things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented
with an everlasting itch for things remote.  I love to sail forbidden
seas, and land on barbarous coasts.  Not ignoring what is good, I am
quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would
they let me--since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all
the inmates of the place one lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the
great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild
conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into
my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of
them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my
arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific.  Quitting the good
city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford.  It was a
Saturday night in December.  Much was I disappointed upon learning
that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no
way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop
at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as
well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing.  For my
mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because
there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected
with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.  Besides
though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the
business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is
now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original--the Tyre
of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was
stranded.  Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal
whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the
Leviathan?  And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first
adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
cobblestones--so goes the story--to throw at the whales, in order to
discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the
bowsprit?

Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before
me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it
became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep
meanwhile.  It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and
dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless.  I knew no one in the
place.  With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only
brought up a few pieces of silver,--So, wherever you go, Ishmael,
said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street
shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with
the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you may
conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire
the price, and don't be too particular.

With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The
Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there.
Further on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn,"
there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the
packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the
congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic
pavement,--rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the
flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles
of my boots were in a most miserable plight.  Too expensive and
jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare
in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within.
But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away from
before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way.  So on I
went.  I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward,
for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either
hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a
tomb.  At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that
quarter of the town proved all but deserted.  But presently I came to
a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which
stood invitingly open.  It had a careless look, as if it were meant
for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was
to stumble over an ash-box in the porch.  Ha! thought I, ha, as the
flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that
destroyed city, Gomorrah?  But "The Crossed Harpoons," and "The
Sword-Fish?"--this, then must needs be the sign of "The Trap."
However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed
on and opened a second, interior door.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet.  A hundred
black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black
Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit.  It was a negro church;
and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the
weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.  Ha, Ishmael, muttered
I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the
docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a
swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly
representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words
underneath--"The Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin."

Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather ominous in that particular connexion,
thought I.  But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I
suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.  As the light
looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and
the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have
been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the
swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought
that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea
coffee.

It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side
palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly.  It stood on a sharp
bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse
howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft.  Euroclydon,
nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with
his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed.  "In judging of that
tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose
works I possess the only copy extant--"it maketh a marvellous
difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where
the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from
that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which
the wight Death is the only glazier."  True enough, thought I, as
this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou reasonest
well.  Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the
house.  What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies
though, and thrust in a little lint here and there.  But it's too
late to make any improvements now.  The universe is finished; the
copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.
Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for
his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might
plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and
yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon.  Euroclydon!
says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one
afterwards) pooh, pooh!  What a fine frosty night; how Orion
glitters; what northern lights!  Let them talk of their oriental
summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of
making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus?  Can he warm his blue hands by holding them
up to the grand northern lights?  Would not Lazarus rather be in
Sumatra than here?  Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise
along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit
itself, in order to keep out this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before
the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should
be moored to one of the Moluccas.  Yet Dives himself, he too lives
like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a
president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of
orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there
is plenty of that yet to come.  Let us scrape the ice from our
frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.  On one side hung a very
large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced,
that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only
by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and
careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an
understanding of its purpose.  Such unaccountable masses of shades
and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young
artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to
delineate chaos bewitched.  But by dint of much and earnest
contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by
throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at
last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might
not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,
portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the
picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
nameless yeast.  A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to
drive a nervous man distracted.  Yet was there a sort of indefinite,
half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you
to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out
what that marvellous painting meant.  Ever and anon a bright, but,
alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.--It's the Black Sea in a
midnight gale.--It's the unnatural combat of the four primal
elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a Hyperborean winter
scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.  But at
last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in
the picture's midst.  THAT once found out, and all the rest were
plain.  But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic
fish? even the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with
whom I conversed upon the subject.  The picture represents a
Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering
there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an
exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in
the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish
array of monstrous clubs and spears.  Some were thickly set with
glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots
of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping
round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed
mower.  You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous
cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such
a hacking, horrifying implement.  Mixed with these were rusty old
whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed.  Some were
storied weapons.  With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed,
fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a
sunrise and a sunset.  And that harpoon--so like a corkscrew now--was
flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards
slain off the Cape of Blanco.  The original iron entered nigh the
tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man,
travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the
hump.

Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut
through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
fireplaces all round--you enter the public room.  A still duskier
place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old
wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some
old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this
corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously.  On one side stood a
long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled
with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks.
Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking
den--the bar--a rude attempt at a right whale's head.  Be that how it
may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a
coach might almost drive beneath it.  Within are shabby shelves,
ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws
of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed
they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their
money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison.  Though
true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses
deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom.  Parallel
meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads'
goblets.  Fill to THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS
a penny more; and so on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure,
which you may gulp down for a shilling.

Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered
about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of
SKRIMSHANDER.  I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be
accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was
full--not a bed unoccupied.  "But avast," he added, tapping his
forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket,
have ye?  I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd better get used
to that sort of thing."

I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should
ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and
that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the
harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander
further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up
with the half of any decent man's blanket.

"I thought so.  All right; take a seat.  Supper?--you want supper?
Supper'll be ready directly."

I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on
the Battery.  At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning
it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at
the space between his legs.  He was trying his hand at a ship under
full sail, but he didn't make much headway, I thought.

At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an
adjoining room.  It was cold as Iceland--no fire at all--the landlord
said he couldn't afford it.  Nothing but two dismal tallow candles,
each in a winding sheet.  We were fain to button up our monkey
jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half
frozen fingers.  But the fare was of the most substantial kind--not
only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for
supper!  One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to
these dumplings in a most direful manner.

"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead
sartainty."

"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"

"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the
harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap.  He never eats dumplings, he
don't--he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."

"The devil he does," says I.  "Where is that harpooneer?  Is he
here?"

"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.

I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark
complexioned" harpooneer.  At any rate, I made up my mind that if it
so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get
into bed before I did.

Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not
what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the
evening as a looker on.

Presently a rioting noise was heard without.  Starting up, the
landlord cried, "That's the Grampus's crew.  I seed her reported in
the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship.
Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."

A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung
open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough.  Enveloped in
their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen
comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with
icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.  They had
just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they
entered.  No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the
whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there
officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round.  One complained
of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like
potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for
all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing,
or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side
of an ice-island.

The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even
with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began
capering about most obstreperously.

I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though
he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his
own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much
noise as the rest.  This man interested me at once; and since the
sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though
but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned),
I will here venture upon a little description of him.  He stood full
six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a
coffer-dam.  I have seldom seen such brawn in a man.  His face was
deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the
contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some
reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.  His voice at
once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I
thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the
Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia.  When the revelry of his companions
had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I
saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea.  In a few
minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it
seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry
of "Bulkington!  Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of
the house in pursuit of him.

It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost
supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate
myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to
the entrance of the seamen.

No man prefers to sleep two in a bed.  In fact, you would a good deal
rather not sleep with your own brother.  I don't know how it is, but
people like to be private when they are sleeping.  And when it comes
to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange
town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections
indefinitely multiply.  Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a
sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors
no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore.  To
be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your
own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in
your own skin.

The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
thought of sleeping with him.  It was fair to presume that being a
harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be
of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest.  I began to twitch all
over.  Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought
to be home and going bedwards.  Suppose now, he should tumble in upon
me at midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been
coming?

"Landlord!  I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't
sleep with him.  I'll try the bench here."

"Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a
mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots
and notches.  "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's
plane there in the bar--wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough."
So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief
first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed,
the while grinning like an ape.  The shavings flew right and left;
till at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot.
The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for
heaven's sake to quit--the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did
not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a
pine plank.  So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and
throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went
about his business, and left me in a brown study.

I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too
short; but that could be mended with a chair.  But it was a foot too
narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher
than the planed one--so there was no yoking them.  I then placed the
first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall,
leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in.
But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me
from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at
all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one
from the window, and both together formed a series of small
whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought
to spend the night.

The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I
steal a march on him--bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed,
not to be wakened by the most violent knockings?  It seemed no bad
idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it.  For who could tell
but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the
harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me
down!

Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of
spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I
began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable
prejudices against this unknown harpooneer.  Thinks I, I'll wait
awhile; he must be dropping in before long.  I'll have a good look at
him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after
all--there's no telling.

But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and
threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.

"Landlord! said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep
such late hours?"  It was now hard upon twelve o'clock.

The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be
mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension.  "No," he
answered, "generally he's an early bird--airley to bed and airley to
rise--yes, he's the bird what catches the worm.  But to-night he
went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him
so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."

"Can't sell his head?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you
are telling me?" getting into a towering rage.  "Do you pretend to
say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed
Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around
this town?"

"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't
sell it here, the market's overstocked."

"With what?" shouted I.

"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"

"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better
stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."

"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I
rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a
slanderin' his head."

"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at
this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.

"It's broke a'ready," said he.

"Broke," said I--"BROKE, do you mean?"

"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."

"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snow-storm--"landlord, stop whittling.  You and I must understand one
another, and that too without delay.  I come to your house and want a
bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half
belongs to a certain harpooneer.  And about this harpooneer, whom I
have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and
exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling
towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of
connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the
highest degree.  I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and
what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe
to spend the night with him.  And in the first place, you will be so
good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I
take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've
no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean,
landlord, YOU, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would
thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution."

"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty
long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then.  But be easy,
be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just
arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New
Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but
one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's
Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the
streets when folks is goin' to churches.  He wanted to, last Sunday,
but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the door with four
heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions."

This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and
showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling
me--but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who
stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged
in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?

"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."

"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder.  "But come, it's getting
dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes--it's a nice bed;
Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced.  There's
plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty
big bed that.  Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and
little Johnny in the foot of it.  But I got a dreaming and sprawling
about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came
near breaking his arm.  Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do.  Come
along here, I'll give ye a glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he lighted
a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead the way.  But I
stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed
"I vum it's Sunday--you won't see that harpooneer to-night; he's come
to anchor somewhere--come along then; DO come; WON'T ye come?"

I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I
was ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure
enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four
harpooneers to sleep abreast.

"There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea
chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; "there,
make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye."  I turned
round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.

Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed.  Though none of
the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well.  I then
glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table,
could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude
shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man
striking a whale.  Of things not properly belonging to the room,
there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one
corner; also a large seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's
wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk.  Likewise, there was a
parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the
fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.

But what is this on the chest?  I took it up, and held it close to
the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to
arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it.  I can compare
it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with
little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills
round an Indian moccasin.  There was a hole or slit in the middle of
this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos.  But could
it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat,
and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise?
I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being
uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though
this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day.  I
went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never
saw such a sight in my life.  I tore myself out of it in such a hurry
that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat.  After thinking some time
on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then
stood in the middle of the room thinking.  I then took off my coat,
and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves.  But beginning to feel
very cold now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what the
landlord said about the harpooneer's not coming home at all that
night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of
my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into
bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven.

Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery,
there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not
sleep for a long time.  At last I slid off into a light doze, and had
pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I
heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light
come into the room from under the door.

Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
head-peddler.  But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a
word till spoken to.  Holding a light in one hand, and that identical
New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and
without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off
from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away at
the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the
room.  I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted
for some time while employed in unlacing the bag's mouth.  This
accomplished, however, he turned round--when, good heavens! what a
sight!  Such a face!  It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here
and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares.  Yes, it's
just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow; he's been in a fight,
got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon.  But at
that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I
plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black
squares on his cheeks.  They were stains of some sort or other.  At
first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the
truth occurred to me.  I remembered a story of a white man--a
whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by
them.  I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant
voyages, must have met with a similar adventure.  And what is it,
thought I, after all!  It's only his outside; a man can be honest in
any sort of skin.  But then, what to make of his unearthly
complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and
completely independent of the squares of tattooing.  To be sure, it
might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never
heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one.
However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun
there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin.  Now, while
all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this
harpooneer never noticed me at all.  But, after some difficulty
having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently
pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair
on.  Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he
then took the New Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed
it down into the bag.  He now took off his hat--a new beaver
hat--when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise.  There was no
hair on his head--none to speak of at least--nothing but a small
scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead.  His bald purplish head now
looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.  Had not the stranger
stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker
than ever I bolted a dinner.

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window,
but it was the second floor back.  I am no coward, but what to make
of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my
comprehension.  Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely
nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as
much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken
into my room at the dead of night.  In fact, I was so afraid of him
that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a
satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last
showed his chest and arms.  As I live, these covered parts of him
were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was
all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty
Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.
Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green
frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.  It was now quite
plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard
of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian
country.  I quaked to think of it.  A peddler of heads too--perhaps
the heads of his own brothers.  He might take a fancy to
mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!

But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me
that he must indeed be a heathen.  Going to his heavy grego, or
wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he
fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little
deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a
three days' old Congo baby.  Remembering the embalmed head, at first
I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved
in some similar manner.  But seeing that it was not at all limber,
and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded
that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to
be.  For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing
the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like
a tenpin, between the andirons.  The chimney jambs and all the bricks
inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very
appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.

I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but
ill at ease meantime--to see what was next to follow.  First he takes
about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and
places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship
biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the
shavings into a sacrificial blaze.  Presently, after many hasty
snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers
(whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded
in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a
little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro.  But the
little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he
never moved his lips.  All these strange antics were accompanied by
still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be
praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other,
during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner.
At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very
unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as
carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.

All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and
seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business
operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,
now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in
which I had so long been bound.

But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal
one.  Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of
it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth
at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke.  The next
moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk
between his teeth, sprang into bed with me.  I sang out, I could not
help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began
feeling me.

Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again.  But
his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill
comprehended my meaning.

"Who-e debel you?"--he at last said--"you no speak-e, dam-me, I
kill-e."  And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about
me in the dark.

"Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I.  "Landlord!
Watch!  Coffin!  Angels! save me!"

"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled
the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered
the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on
fire.  But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the
room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.

"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here
wouldn't harm a hair of your head."

"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that
that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"

"I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads
around town?--but turn flukes again and go to sleep.  Queequeg, look
here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"

"Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
sitting up in bed.

"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and
throwing the clothes to one side.  He really did this in not only a
civil but a really kind and charitable way.  I stood looking at him a
moment.  For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely
looking cannibal.  What's all this fuss I have been making about,
thought I to myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has
just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe,
or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I
will turn in with him.  But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed
with me.  It's dangerous.  Besides, I ain't insured."

This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to one side as much as to
say--I won't touch a leg of ye."

"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."

I turned in, and never slept better in my life.