The sperm had cooled and crystallized into lumps rolling in liquid. Ishmael squeezed them back into fluid—a sweet, unctuous duty. His fingers grew serpentine in soft globules that broke like ripe grapes discharging wine. He snuffed the uncontaminated aroma, like spring violets, and lived as in a musky meadow. He forgot the horrible oath and felt divinely free from all ill-will.
Squeeze, squeeze, all morning long. He squeezed till a strange insanity came over him, and he found himself squeezing his co-laborers’ hands, mistaking them for the gentle globules. Let us squeeze hands all round, he thought—let us squeeze ourselves into the very milk of kindness. He had perceived that man must lower his conceit of attainable felicity to the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country. He saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Now other substances: white-horse, tough congealed tendons cut into oblongs like marble; plum-pudding, that mottled flesh with crimson and gold which he tasted like a royal cutlet; slobgollion, the oozy stringy membranes found after squeezing; gurry, the dark glutinous scrapings from right whales; nippers, tendinous strips used to clean oily decks.
Descend into the blubber-room to learn these matters. The gaffman hooks a sheet of blubber while the spade-man stands upon it, chopping it into horse-pieces. The spade is razor-sharp; the spade-man’s feet are shoeless. The blubber slides like a sledge. Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.
A strange black cone lay in the lee scuppers—longer than a tall man, dark as the idol Queequeg worshipped. Such an idol as Queen Maachah kept in her secret groves until King Asa destroyed it at the brook Kedron. The mincer shouldered this grandissimus like a grenadier bearing a fallen comrade, stripped its dark pelt, stretched it, then cut armholes and stepped inside. Invested in the black canonicals of his office, he took his post at the wooden horse to mince blubber. In decent black, bent over his work, he seemed a candidate for archbishopric. “Bible leaves!” the mates cried—cut the slices thin to speed the boiling.
The mincer’s black cassock and the try-works are part of the same operation, though one describes the man and the other the furnace; as the minced blubber thin slices are cut, they travel onward to the fire.
An American whaler carries a strange contradiction: solid masonry fused with oak and hemp. The try-works rise between the masts, a brick mass secured by iron knees. Beneath the hatch lie two great try-pots, polished bright, where sailors curl up to sleep and Ishmael once pondered geometry. The furnace side presents two iron mouths fitted with heavy doors, opening beneath the pots. A shallow water reservoir runs beneath the whole structure, keeping the deck from scorching. No chimneys rise here—smoke pours straight from the rear wall.
Stubb orders the first firing at nine. Wood begins it, but afterward the whale feeds his own destruction. The shriveled scraps of blubber become fuel. The creature burns by his own substance, a self-devouring martyr. His smoke chokes the lungs with a funereal stench, reeking of pyres and judgment.
By midnight the works blaze at full throttle. Flames lick the darkness from the sooty flues. The ship drives forward like a fire-ship bound on vengeance, recalling the burning brigs of Canaris. The pagan harpooneers work the hearth, demonic figures pitching blubber into boiling pots while flames curl toward their feet. The watch sprawls on the windlass, faces blackened, exchanging wild stories whose laughter rises like forked fire. The Pequod plunges into blackness, burning a corpse, bearing savages and flame—a vessel that mirrors her captain’s obsessed spirit.
Ishmael stands at the helm, wrapped in shadow, watching the inferno. The demonic shapes breed visions in his mind. He starts from sleep to find himself disoriented—no compass visible, only red flashes in black gloom. He has turned completely around, facing the stern. He spins back just in time to keep the ship from capsizing.
Do not gaze long into fire, Ishmael warns. Never dream with a hand on the helm; turn not thy back to the compass, but accept the first hint of the hitching tiller. Believe not the artificial fire when its redness makes all things look ghastly. The sun conceals nothing—not the ocean, earth’s dark side, nor any wilderness of grief. A man with more joy than sorrow cannot be true. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s; Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. Yet there exists a Catskill eagle in certain souls: it can plunge into the deepest ravines and still rise into sunlight, and even at its lowest swoop, it flies higher than any bird on the plain.
The forecastle glows like a shrine of canonized kings, lamps flashing on sleeping sailors. Merchant seamen find oil scarcer than queens’ milk, dressing and eating in darkness, but the whaleman seeks the food of light and lives in light, replenishing his lamps at the try-works, burning oil sweet as April grass butter.
The leviathan has been hunted and processed, leaving only the final act of decanting the warm oil into casks. As the ship pitches in the midnight sea, enormous barrels are slewed across the slippery deck while sailors hammer the hoops, acting temporarily as coopers. Once the last pint is secured, the hatches are unsealed and the casks descend to their final rest in the hold, sealing the whale’s return to the depths.
A profound transformation follows. Where the decks recently streamed with blood and the ship seemed a leviathan of chaos, the unmanufactured oil now possesses a cleansing virtue. Using potent lye made from burned scraps, the crew scrubs the bulwarks and rigging until the vessel resembles a silent, neat merchantman. The men wash and dress in fresh clothes, stepping onto the immaculate planks like bridegrooms from Holland, humorously discussing parlors and demanding napkins.
Yet aloft, three men stand watch at the mastheads. Scarcely have the mortals extracted the small but valuable sperm from the world’s vast bulk, or cleansed themselves to inhabit clean tabernacles of the soul, when the cry erupts: There she blows! The ghost spouts up, and they sail away to fight another world, repeating young life’s old routine. Oh, the metempsychosis! Ishmael recalls sailing with Pythagoras along the Peruvian coast, where the foolish narrator taught the wise, ancient philosopher how to splice a rope.
Ahab paced his quarter-deck in measured turns between binnacle and mainmast, and when darkest moods seized him, he would halt at each station to fix his gaze upon whatever object stood before him. At the mainmast, his eyes locked onto the gold doubloon nailed there—an anchor for his wild longing amid the nailed firmness of his resolve.
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