Moby Dick; Or, The Whale. Herman Melville

hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer. “Young man, you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy—why Father Mapple himself couldn’t beat it, and he’s reckoned something. Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there—what’s that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?”

      Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—

      “Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.

      “Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.”

      “Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. “Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we’ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.”

      So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled among the same ship’s company to which I myself belonged.

      When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for signing, he turned to me and said, “I guess, Quohog there don’t know how to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy mark?”

      But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain Peleg’s obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like this:—

      Quohog. his X mark.

      Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one entitled “The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,” placed it in Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, “Son of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!”

      Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language, heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.

      “Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,” cried Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ’em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.”

      “Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou thyself, as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can’st thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did’st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?”

      “Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets—“hear him, all of ye. Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.”

      Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise might have been wasted.

CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.

       Table of Contents

      “Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”

      Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.

      “Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.

      “You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little more time for an uninterrupted look at him.

      “Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.

      “Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”

      “Anything down there about your souls?”

      “About what?”

      “Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I know many chaps that hav’n’t got any—good luck to ’em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”

      “What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.

      “He’s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the word he.

      “Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he’s talking about something and somebody we don’t know.”

      “Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old Thunder yet, have ye?”

      “Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his manner.

      “Captain Ahab.”

      “What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”

      “Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav’n’t seen him yet, have ye?”

      “No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be all right again before long.”

      “All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be all right; not before.”

      “What do you know about