Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/BOOKS/Novels/H.Melville/moby.50

Text File | 1994-05-27 | 5.7 KB | 88 lines

.. < chapter L 27  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
.. <p 228 >
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
.. <p 229 >
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
.. <p 230 >
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.
.. <p 230 >