Call me Ishmael. Years ago, finding myself poor and aimless on land, I decided to sail and view the watery world. This is my method for curing melancholy and regulating my blood. Whenever my mouth grows grim, or my soul feels like a damp, drizzly November, I know it is time to leave. The urge becomes undeniable when I pause before coffin before warehouses, trail behind funerals, or feel a manic impulse to knock hats off in the street. Going to sea is my alternative to suicide. While Cato died on his sword with a flourish, I quietly board a ship. This impulse is not unique; almost all men feel a magnetic pull toward the ocean.
The mate pressed on into theology. Did Fleece belong to the church? The old man had once passed a church in Cape Town. Yet he stood here telling lies about the steak being well-cooked. Where did he expect to go when he died? Fleece pointed his tongs upward: some blessed angel would fetch him. Stubb seized on the gesture—if heaven lay aloft, the cook would have to climb the rigging to get there, and it grew colder the higher one climbed.
He concluded with a string of contradictory orders for future meals: fin-tips pickled, fluke-ends soused, cutlets at the mid-watch, whale-balls for breakfast. Fleece limped away, muttering that Stubb was more shark than the sharks themselves.
Ishmael examines the history and philosophy of consuming whale meat, noting that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was a delicacy in France, and porpoises were highly esteemed in Henry VIII’s court. While the Esquimaux and unprejudiced whalers like Stubb partake of the creature, civilized men often recoil due to the sheer scale and excessive richness of the meat. The spermaceti, though too rich to replace butter, is often used by seamen to fry their ship-biscuit. The brains of a small Sperm Whale are considered a fine dish resembling calves’ head—and Ishmael notes with dark irony that young bucks among the epicures dine on calves’ brains in hopes of acquiring some intelligence of their own, though the calf’s head seems to regard them with a reproachful expression. Ishmael argues that the abhorrence landsmen feel stems from the idea of eating a creature by its own light, yet he exposes the hypocrisy of civilized gourmands who feast on bloated goose livers while condemning cannibals. He points out that these enlightened diners use the bones of the ox they eat to carve their meat and the feathers of the goose to pick their teeth, proving their own complicity in the brutal economy of nature.
After the crew secures the whale, Stubb sets the anchor-watch, assigning Queequeg and a seaman to defend the carcass from a voracious swarm of sharks. Illuminating the turbid water with lanterns, the two mariners engage in a desperate battle, darting long whaling-spades deep into the sharks’ skulls. The creatures display supernatural ferocity, snapping at their own entrails in a foamy, cannibalistic frenzy. Even death offers no safety; when a dead shark is hoisted on deck for its skin, it nearly severs Queequeg’s hand with a snap of its jaw. Nursing his injury, Queequeg reflects on the malevolent vitality lurking in the creature’s joints, concluding that whatever god created such a demoniac being must be a “dam Ingin.”
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