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_ Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A
happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they
came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent
crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman
joiner engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he
presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but
a dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular
about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an
old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the
whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying
lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He
would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the
most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted
the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death
itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all,
might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that
way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took
it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir
themselves there, about something which he would find out when he
obeyed the order, and not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their
packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of
his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his
short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face.
You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk
without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes
there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand;
and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession,
lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading
them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead
of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his
mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of
his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air,
whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless
miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as
in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated
handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal
tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of
disinfecting agent.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard.
A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning
whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had
personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a
sort of point of honour with him, to destroy them whenever
encountered. So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for
the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead
to anything like an apprehension of any possible danger from
encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was
but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring
only a little circumvention and some small application of time and
trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious
fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of
whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years'
voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length
of time. As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought nails and
cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one
of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They called
him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could be
well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic
whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy
concussions of those battering seas.
Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous
men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the
whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or,
being armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a
picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of
javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a
Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or
harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh
lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the
assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a
close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in
this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what
headsman each of them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had
selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last
remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the
neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring
harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of
Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek
bones, and black rounding eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their
largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression--all this
sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of
those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England
moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main.
But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the
woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the
sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible
arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky
limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of
the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son
of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the
second mate's squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold.
Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the
sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the
top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily
shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native
coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa,
Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and
having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the
ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they
shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a
giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in
his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and
a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce
of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus
Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said,
that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men
before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans
born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the
same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and
military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in
the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I
say, because in all these cases the native American liberally
provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying
the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the
Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to
augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores.
In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London,
put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of
their crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again.
How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best
whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, ISOLATOES
too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but
each ISOLATO living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now,
federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An
Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all
the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the
world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them
ever come back. Black Little Pip--he never did--oh, no! he went
before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall
ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal
time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid
strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a
coward here, hailed a hero there! _
Read next: CHAPTER 28 Ahab.
Read previous: CHAPTER 26 Knights and Squires.
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