Chapter L: AHAB'S BOAT AND CREW. FEDALLAH
Who would have thought it, Flask! cried Stubb; if I had but one leg
you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole
with my timber toe. Oh! he's a wonderful old man! I don't think it
so strange, after all, on that account, said Flask. If his leg were
off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would
disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you
know. I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it
is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active
perils of the chase. So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears
in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried
into the thickest of the fight. But with Ahab the question assumed a
modified aspect. Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling
wight in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales
is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every
individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these
circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in
the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must
have plainly thought not. Ahab well knew that although his friends at
home would think little of his entering a boat in certain
comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of
being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet
for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a
regular headsman in the hunt --above all for Captain Ahab to be
supplied with five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew
that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of
the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crew from them,
nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless
he had taken private measures of his own touching all that
matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little
foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of
port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and
then found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with
his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and
even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the
line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all
this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an
extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it
better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the
anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy
cleat, as it is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's
bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale;
when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his
solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and
with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and straightened
it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest
and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this
particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to
the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his
intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a
supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any
boat's crew being assigned to that boat. now, with the subordinate
phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler
wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and
ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes
of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships
themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing
about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whale-boats,
canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself
might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the
captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the
forecastle. But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the
subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though
still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned
Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a
mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon
evinced himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so
far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but
it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But
one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was
such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone
only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now
and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially
the Oriental isles to the east of the continent --those insulated,
immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days
still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal
generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct
recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came,
eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon
why they were created and to what end; when though, according to
genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the
devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.