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_ (AS TOLD AT THE GOLDEN INN)
The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there,
is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you
meet more travellers than in any other part.
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was
manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued
she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest
in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the
Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a
certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called
judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This
latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming
what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be
narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For
that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the
Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate
white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to
Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night
Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that
way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest.
Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those
seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by
such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this
matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never
transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its proper
place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the
ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on
lasting record.
*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the
mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos
terrapin.
For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once
narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one
saint's eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden
Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian,
were on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions
they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.
"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am
about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of
Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days'
sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was
somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling
the pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that she made
more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had
stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having some unusual reason
for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and
therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then
considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it
after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy
weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working
at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more
days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it
sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the
captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the
islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the
way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically
relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep
the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In
truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very
prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in
perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least
fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the
mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt,
a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'
said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your
courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far
Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had
yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions
popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing
aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario,
and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like
expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of
its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round
archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in
large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the
Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous
territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks;
here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like
craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings
of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild
barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry
wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered
forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in
Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of
prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar
Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as
well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant
ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech
canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as
any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out
of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a
midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though
an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured;
as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in
his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to
nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed
our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite
as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh
from the latitudes of buck-horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this
Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a
mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible
firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition
which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had
long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved
so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt--but,
gentlemen, you shall hear.
"It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her
prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again
increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps
every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like
our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping
their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should
the officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect,
the probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again
remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom.
Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward,
gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at
their pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable
length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if
any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a
leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters,
some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a
little anxious.
"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was
found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern
manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate.
He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew,
and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose,
was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort of
nervous apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless,
unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently
imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about
the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only
on account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were
working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small
gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood with their feet
continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any
mountain spring, gentlemen--that bubbling from the pumps ran across
the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee
scupper-holes.
"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this
conventional world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person
placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very
significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway
against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and
bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize
that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. Be
this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt
was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing
golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's
snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him,
gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son
to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule;
yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt,
and Steelkilt knew it.
"Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on
with his gay banterings.
"'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin,
one of ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling!
I tell ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it! he had
best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is,
boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he's come back again with a
gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and
the whole posse of 'em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at
the bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here
now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter 'em. They're playing
the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he's a simple old
soul,--Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his
property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he'd give a
poor devil like me the model of his nose.'
"'Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney,
pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk. 'Thunder away at
it!'
'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. 'Lively, boys,
lively, now!' And with that the pump clanged like fifty
fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that
peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest
tension of life's utmost energies.
"Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman
went forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his
face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from
his brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed
Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated
state, I know not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along
the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the
planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters
consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large.
"Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of
household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly
attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case
of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the
inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in
seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing
their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the
prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides,
it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into
gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman
of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of
the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any trivial
business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the
case with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you
may understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men.
"But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost
as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had
spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will
understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman
fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat
still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's
malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in
him and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he
instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and
unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any already
ireful being--a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really
valiant men even when aggrieved--this nameless phantom feeling,
gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
"Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that
sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And
then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three
lads as the customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the
pumps, had done little or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied
with an oath, in a most domineering and outrageous manner
unconditionally reiterating his command; meanwhile advancing upon the
still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper's club hammer which he
had snatched from a cask near by.
"Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps,
for all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating
Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow
still smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he
remained doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed
Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously
commanding him to do his bidding.
"Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated
his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had
not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with
his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it
was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round
the windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking
him that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the
Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
"'Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
yourself.' But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him,
where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an
inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable
maledictions. Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch;
stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his glance,
Steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing
it back, told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek
he (Steelkilt) would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been
branded for the slaughter by the gods. Immediately the hammer
touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw of the mate was
stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale.
"Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
mastheads. They were both Canallers.
"'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many whale-ships in our
harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are
they?'
"'Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal.
You must have heard of it.'
"'Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and
hereditary land, we know but little of your vigorous North.'
"'Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and
ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for
such information may throw side-light upon my story.'
"For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities
and most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps,
and affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by
billiard-room and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great
forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade;
by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery
of those noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white
chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one
continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life.
There's your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where
you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow,
and the snug patronising lee of churches. For by some curious
fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that
they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen,
most abound in holiest vicinities.
"'Is that a friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards into
the crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
"'Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in
Lima,' laughed Don Sebastian. 'Proceed, Senor.'
"'A moment! Pardon!' cried another of the company. 'In the name of
all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we
have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present
Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow
and look surprised; you know the proverb all along this
coast--"Corrupt as Lima." It but bears out your saying, too;
churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open--and
"Corrupt as Lima." So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city
of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark!--St. Dominic, purge it! Your
cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.'
"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would
make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is
he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed,
flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his
red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny
deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish
guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and
gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the
smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart
visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond
on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these
Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it
is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of
violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor
stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum,
gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically
evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its
most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except
Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does
it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many
thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the
probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition
between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly
ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.
"'I see! I see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his
chicha upon his silvery ruffles. 'No need to travel! The world's
one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the
generations were cold and holy as the hills.--But the story.'
"I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay.
Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior
mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But
sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed
into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the
forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt,
and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm's way, the
valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon
his officers to manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him
along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran close up to the
revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart of it
with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But
Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they
succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing
about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass, these
sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.
"'Come out of that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing
them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward.
'Come out of that, ye cut-throats!'
"Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,
defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to
understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) death would be the
signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in
his heart lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little
desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to
their duty.
"'Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?' demanded their
ringleader.
"'Turn to! turn to!--I make no promise;--to your duty! Do you want
to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!' and
he once more raised a pistol.
"'Sink the ship?' cried Steelkilt. 'Aye, let her sink. Not a man of
us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us.
What say ye, men?' turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their
response.
"The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his
eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:--'It's
not our fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his hammer away;
it was boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him
not to prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here
against his cursed jaw; ain't those mincing knives down in the
forecastle there, men? look to those handspikes, my hearties.
Captain, by God, look to yourself; say the word; don't be a fool;
forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us decently, and we're
your men; but we won't be flogged.'
"'Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!'
"'Look ye, now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
'there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped
for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row; it's
not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but
we won't be flogged.'
"'Turn to!' roared the Captain.
"Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:--'I tell you
what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a
shabby rascal, we won't lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us;
but till you say the word about not flogging us, we don't do a hand's
turn.'
"'Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there
till ye're sick of it. Down ye go.'
"'Shall we?' cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were
against it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded
him down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears
into a cave.
"As the Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks, the
Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over
the slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and
loudly called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock
belonging to the companionway.
Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something down
the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them--ten in
number--leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had
remained neutral.
"All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward
and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway;
at which last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after
breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness
passed in peace; the men who still remained at their duty toiling
hard at the pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals through
the dreary night dismally resounded through the ship.
"At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck,
summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water
was then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit
were tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and
pocketing it, the Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every
day for three days this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a
confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary
summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the
forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness
of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of
ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at
discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to
the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his
babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning
three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the
desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were
left.
"'Better turn to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
"'Shut us up again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt.
"'Oh certainly,' the Captain, and the key clicked.
"It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of
seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that
had last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place
as black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt
proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with
him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the
garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic,
heavy implements with a handle at each end) run amuck from the
bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of desperation
possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would do this, he said,
whether they joined him or not. That was the last night he should
spend in that den. But the scheme met with no opposition on the part
of the other two; they swore they were ready for that, or for any
other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender. And what was
more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the
time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as
fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly
as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the
matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but
admit one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these
miscreants must come out.
"Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same
piece of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in
order to be the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to
surrender; and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such
conduct might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination
still to lead them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle
chemistry of villany, mixed their before secret treacheries together;
and when their leader fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls
to each other in three sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords,
and gagged him with cords; and shrieked out for the Captain at
midnight.
"Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he
and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle.
In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot,
the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his
perfidious allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a man
who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and
dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were
seized up into the mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and
there they hung till morning. 'Damn ye,' cried the Captain, pacing
to and fro before them, 'the vultures would not touch ye, ye
villains!'
"At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had
rebelled from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the
former that he had a good mind to flog them all round--thought, upon
the whole, he would do so--he ought to--justice demanded it; but for
the present, considering their timely surrender, he would let them go
with a reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.
"'But as for you, ye carrion rogues,' turning to the three men in the
rigging--'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;' and,
seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the
two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their
heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
"'My wrist is sprained with ye!' he cried, at last; 'but there is
still rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give
up. Take that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say
for himself.'
"For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his
cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a
sort of hiss, 'What I say is this--and mind it well--if you flog me,
I murder you!'
"'Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me'--and the Captain drew off
with the rope to strike.
"'Best not,' hissed the Lakeman.
"'But I must,'--and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
"Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the
Captain; who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the
deck rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his
rope, said, 'I won't do it--let him go--cut him down: d'ye hear?'
But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale
man, with a bandaged head, arrested them--Radney the chief mate.
Ever since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning,
hearing the tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had
watched the whole scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he
could hardly speak; but mumbling something about his being willing
and able to do what the captain dared not attempt, he snatched the
rope and advanced to his pinioned foe.
"'You are a coward!' hissed the Lakeman.
"'So I am, but take that.' The mate was in the very act of striking,
when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then
pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's threat,
whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down, all
hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the
iron pumps clanged as before.
"Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor
was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running
up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the
crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at
their own instance they were put down in the ship's run for
salvation. Still, no sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On
the contrary, it seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they
had resolved to maintain the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders
to the last, and, when the ship reached port, desert her in a body.
But in order to insure the speediest end to the voyage, they all
agreed to another thing--namely, not to sing out for whales, in case
any should be discovered. For, spite of her leak, and spite of all her
other perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her mast-heads, and her
captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on
the day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney the mate
was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his
bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the vital jaw of the whale.
"But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till
all was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the
man who had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in
Radney the chief mate's watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to
run more than half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the
rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain,
upon resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or
two other circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of
his revenge.
"During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of
the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side.
In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a
considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between
this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his
next trick at the helm would come round at two o'clock, in the
morning of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At
his leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something very
carefully in his watches below.
"'What are you making there?' said a shipmate.
"'What do you think? what does it look like?'
"'Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me.'
'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length
before him; 'but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough
twine,--have you any?'
"But there was none in the forecastle.
"'Then I must get some from old Rad;' and he rose to go aft.
"'You don't mean to go a begging to HIM!' said a sailor.
"'Why not? Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help
himself in the end, shipmate?' and going to the mate, he looked at
him quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It
was given him--neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the
next night an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the
pocket of the Lakeman's monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat
into his hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at
the silent helm--nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave
always ready dug to the seaman's hand--that fatal hour was then to
come; and in the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was
already stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed
in.
"But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody
deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being
the avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to
step in to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he
would have done.
"It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the
second day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid
Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted
out, 'There she rolls! there she rolls!' Jesu, what a whale! It was
Moby Dick.
"'Moby Dick!' cried Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do
whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?'
"'A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster,
Don;--but that would be too long a story.'
"'How? how?' cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
"'Nay, Dons, Dons--nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get
more into the air, Sirs.'
"'The chicha! the chicha!' cried Don Pedro; 'our vigorous friend looks
faint;--fill up his empty glass!'
"No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.--Now, gentlemen, so
suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the
ship--forgetful of the compact among the crew--in the excitement of
the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily
lifted his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it
had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was
now a phrensy. 'The White Whale--the White Whale!' was the cry from
captain, mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours,
were all anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the
dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of
the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun,
shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea.
Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these
events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.
The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it
was his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood up with his lance in
the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command.
Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate's got the start;
and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he
strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast,
and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a
furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to
beach him on the whale's topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman
hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two
whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as against a
sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate. That
instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat righted,
and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into
the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the
spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly
seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale
rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his
jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went
down.
"Meantime, at the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had
slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific,
downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line.
He cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick
rose again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen shirt, caught
in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase
again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.
"In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port--a savage, solitary
place--where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the
Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately
deserted among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a
large double war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some
other harbor.
"The ship's company being reduced to but a handful, the captain
called upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of
heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting
vigilance over their dangerous allies was this small band of whites
necessitated, both by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard
work they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea,
they were in such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put
off with them in so heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his
officers, he anchored the ship as far off shore as possible; loaded
and ran out his two cannon from the bows; stacked his muskets on the
poop; and warning the Islanders not to approach the ship at their
peril, took one man with him, and setting the sail of his best
whale-boat, steered straight before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred
miles distant, to procure a reinforcement to his crew.
"On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which
seemed to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from
it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of
Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water.
The captain presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the
yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that
if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in
bubbles and foam.
"'What do you want of me?' cried the captain.
"'Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded
Steelkilt; 'no lies.'
"'I am bound to Tahiti for more men.'
"'Very good. Let me board you a moment--I come in peace.' With that
he leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale,
stood face to face with the captain.
"'Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me.
As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightning strike
me!'
"'A pretty scholar,' laughed the Lakeman. 'Adios, Senor!' and
leaping into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
"Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the
roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due
time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck
befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were
providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the
sailor headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the start of
their former captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal
retribution.
"Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,
and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small
native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all
right there, again resumed his cruisings.
"Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses
to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
destroyed him.
"'Are you through?' said Don Sebastian, quietly.
"'I am, Don.'
"'Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing
wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with
me if I seem to press.'
"'Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don
Sebastian's suit,' cried the company, with exceeding interest.
"'Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn,
gentlemen?'
"'Nay,' said Don Sebastian; 'but I know a worthy priest near by, who
will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well
advised? this may grow too serious.'
"'Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?'
"'Though there are no Auto-da-Fe's in Lima now,' said one of the
company to another; 'I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the
archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see
no need of this.'
"'Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg
that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized
Evangelists you can.'
'This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,' said Don
Sebastian, gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.
"'Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the
light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
"'So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye,
gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to
be true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew;
I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.'" _
Read next: CHAPTER 55 Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
Read previous: CHAPTER 53 The Gam.
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