But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego,Daggoo—instinctively sprang to their feet, and standing in a diagonal row,simultaneously pointed their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer,their three Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and white-fire!The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s headlong rush,bumped the German’s aside with such force,that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out,and sailed over by the three flying keels.
“Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as he shot by;“ye’ll be picked up presently—all right—I saw some sharks astern—St. Bernard’s dogs,you know—relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah!this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam!Hurrah!—Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar!This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain—makes the wheel-spokes fly,boys, when you fasten to him that way; and there’s danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah!this is the way a fellow feels when he’s going to Davy Jones—all a rush down an endless inclined plane!Hurrah!this whale carries the everlasting mail!”
But the monster’s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded.With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines,that using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on;till at last—owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the boats,whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water,while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound,for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line,though the position was a little ticklish.But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this “holding on,” as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from the back;this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes.Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing,it is to be doubted whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable to presume,that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because,owing to the enormous surface of him—in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet—the pressure of the water is immense.We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here,above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale,bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean!It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres.One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.
As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon;and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay,not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought,that beneath all that silence and placidity,the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended?and to what?To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said—“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?or his head with fish-spears?The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon:he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature?this he?Oh!that unfulfilments should follow the prophets.For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail,Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea,to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears!
In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface,must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes’ army.Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated in the water,distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires,the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat.The next moment, relieved in great part from the downward strain at the bows,the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will,when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea.
“Haul in!Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.”
The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand’s breadth could have been gained,were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the boats,and soon the whale broke water within two ship’s lengths of the hunters.
His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion.In most land animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins,whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions.Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels,so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon,a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system;and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface,his life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams.Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains,that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period;even as in a drought a river will flow,whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now,when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes,and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound,which kept continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals,however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came,because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was untouched.
As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form,with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes,or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld.As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate,so from the points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs,horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm,and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered,in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men,and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or protuberance,the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.
“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”
“Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no need of that!”
But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound,and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood,with swift fury blindly darted at the craft,bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore,capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time,so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made;lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly;lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout.As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain,and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.
Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship,the body showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately,by Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured to it at different points,so that ere long every boat was a buoy;the sunken whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords.By very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side,and was strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains,for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom.
It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh,on the lower part of the bunch before described.But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales,with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place;therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to.But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him,not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance?And when?It might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before America was discovered.
What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet there is no telling.But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries,by the ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea,owing to the body’s immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck,who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed,that when at length the ship would have been capsized,if still persisting in locking arms with the body; then,when the command was given to break clear from it,such was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were fastened,that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant.To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house.The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places,by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains,to pry them adrift from the timberheads;and so low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached,while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk,and the ship seemed on the point of going over.
“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t be in such a devil of a hurry to sink!By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying there; avast,I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains.”
“Knife?Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole,and steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks,were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap,every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a very curious thing;nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it.Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy,with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface.If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures,their pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic;then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking,consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales,in the highest health, and swelling with noble aspirations,prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them;even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this accident than any other species.Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do.This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale;his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton;from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances where,after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again rises,more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases are generated in him;he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon.A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings,among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him,with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone down,they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.
It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the Pequod’s mast-heads,announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats;though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back,belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming.Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale’s,that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it.And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute.The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four young keels,and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.
Oh!many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
The more I dive into this matter of whaling,and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity;and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts,who one way or other have shed distinction upon it,I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman;and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said,that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent.Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed,and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda;how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast,and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen,intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid.It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day;inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart.And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale,which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew.When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph.What seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed,by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St.George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale;for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together,and often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth,some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides,it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St.George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land,instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake,but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.
Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us;for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape,and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback,yet considering the great ignorance of those times,when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus’ case,St. George’s whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach;and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal,or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind,it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene,to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact,placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh,and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel,his horse’s head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him,and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp,even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights,we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George.And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say,have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron),let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain,since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St. George’s decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained dubious:for though according to the Greek mythologies,that antique Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds,was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman of him,that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed,from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman;at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan.
But, by the best contradictory authorities,this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale;and vice versâ; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demi-god then, why not the prophet?
Nor do 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 whale.When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster,resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo,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 a whaleman, then?even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?
Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo!there’s a member-roll for you!What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?
CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter.Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the whale.But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who,standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times,equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin;and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates;one of which represented Jonah’s whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale,and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying,“A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very small. But, to this,Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop,that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale’s belly,but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth.And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly,the Right Whale’s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables,and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too,Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.
Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of faith in this matter of the prophet,was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric juices.But this objection likewise falls to the ground,because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a _dead_ whale—even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called “The Whale,” as some craft are nowadays christened the “Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.” Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days’ journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days’ journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is that?
But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh?Yes. He might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope.But not to speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean,and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea,such a supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days,not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh,being too shallow for any whale to swim in. Besides,this idea of Jonah’s weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz,its reputed discoverer, and so make modern history a liar.
But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish pride of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him,seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea.I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable,devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest,this very idea of Jonah’s going to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general miracle.And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris’s Voyages,speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah,in which Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.
CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed;and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat;they grease the bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm,it may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are hostile;that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to make the boat slide bravely.Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat,and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared,took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom,where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft’s bald keel.He seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment.Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.
Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them,they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.
Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great exertion,Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale, without at all sounding,still continued his horizontal flight, with added fleetness.Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it.It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him.But to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What then remained?
Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless subtleties,to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,none exceed that fine manœuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad sword,in all its exercises boasts nothing like it.It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale;its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking,jerking boat, under extreme headway. Steel and wood included,the entire spear is some ten or twelve feet in length;the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a lighter material—pine.It is furnished with a small rope called a warp, of considerable length,by which it can be hauled back to the hand after darting.
But before going further, it is important to mention here,that though the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom done;and when done, is still less frequently successful,on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as compared with the lance,which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a general thing, therefore,you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling comes into play.
Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous,deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies,was specially qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him;he stands upright in the tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam,the towing whale is forty feet ahead. Handling the long lance lightly,glancing twice or thrice along its length to see if it be exactly straight,Stubb whistlingly gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand,so as to secure its free end in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed.Then holding the lance full before his waistband’s middle, he levels it at the whale; when,covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand,thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm,fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his chin.Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse,in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance,and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.