Chapter VII: THE CHAPEL
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are
the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific,
who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did
not. Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon
this special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to
driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the
cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.
Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and
sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at
times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed
purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were
insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and
there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing
several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on
either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the
following, but I do not pretend to quote: -- Sacred To the Memory of
John Talbot, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the
Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, . This Tablet Is
erected to his Memory By his Sister. Sacred To the Memory of Robert
Long, Willis Ellery, Nathan Coleman, Walter Canny, Seth Macy, and
Samuel Gleig, Forming one of the boats' crews of the Ship Eliza, Who
were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the
Pacific, December 31st, . This Marble Is here placed by their
surviving Shipmates. Sacred To the Memory of The late Captain Ezekiel
Hardy, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the
coast of Japan, August 3d, This Tablet Is erected to his Memory by His
Widow. Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I
seated myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see
Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a
wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This
savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance;
because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was
not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the
relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the
congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in
the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the
countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel
sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing
hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old
wounds to bleed afresh. Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the
green grass; who standing among flowers can say --here, here lies my
beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like
these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover
no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly
voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon
all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly
perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the
cave of Elephanta as here. In what census of living creatures, the
dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says
of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than
the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed
for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and
yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies
of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay
death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring
paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died
sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be
comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in
unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead;
wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole
city. All these things are not without their meanings. But Faith,
like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts
she gathers her most vital hope. It needs scarcely to be told, with
what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those
marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day
read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me, Yes, Ishmael,
the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry
again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it
seems -- aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes,
there is death in this business of whaling --a speechlessly quick
chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we
have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that
what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks
that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters
observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the
thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And
therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove
body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.