Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.

Descend from the try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle, where the off-duty watch sleeps, and for a moment you’d think you stood in an illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors: there they lie in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness, a score of lamps flashing on their hooded eyes. In most merchantmen, oil for the sailors is scarcer than queen’s milk; they dress, eat, stumble to their pallets in the dark. But the whaleman, who seeks the food of light, lives in light: he makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, so even the pitchiest night the ship’s black hull glows with illumination. He takes his handful of lamps—often just old bottles and vials—to the copper cooler at the try-works to refill them as casually as drawing mugs of ale from a vat. He burns the purest, unmanufactured sperm oil, sweet as early April grass butter, unvitiated by solar or lunar contrivances ashore. He hunts for his own oil, to be sure of its freshness, just as a prairie traveller hunts his own supper of game.

CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.

We have already followed the leviathan from the mast-head sighting, to the chase through the watery valleys, to the slaughter alongside the ship, to the beheading, to the claim of his padded blubber coat by his executioner, to his condemnation to the try-pots, where his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass through the fire unscathed like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Now only the final act remains: decanting his oil into casks, stowing it in the hold, where leviathan returns to the native depths of the sea, sliding beneath the surface once more, never to rise and blow again. While the oil is still warm, like hot punch, it is poured into six-barrel casks; as the ship pitches and rolls in the midnight sea, the enormous casks skid across the slippery deck like landslides, man-handled into place by the crew, every sailor acting as a cooper hammering the hoops until they seat tight. When the last pint is casked and the oil cools, the great hatchways are unsealed, the ship’s bowels thrown open, and the casks dropped down to their final rest in the sea, the hatches sealed shut again like a closet walled up.

This is one of the most remarkable incidents of the sperm fishery. One day, the decks stream with blood and oil, the quarter-deck is piled with enormous masses of the whale’s head, great rusty casks lie about like a brewery yard, smoke from the try-works has besooted every bulwark, the crew is covered in unctuousness, the entire ship feels like the leviathan itself, the din deafening. A day or two later, you’d almost swear you stood on a silent merchant vessel, so scrupulously neat is the deck: the unmanufactured sperm oil has a singular cleansing virtue, so the decks never look whiter than right after an “affair of oil.” Lye made from the burnt blubber scraps exterminates any leftover adhesiveness from the whale’s flesh, the bulwarks are scrubbed with buckets of water and rags, soot brushed from the lower rigging, every tool cleansed and put away, the great hatch scrubbed and placed over the try-works to hide the pots, every cask stowed out of sight, tackles coiled in hidden nooks. When the entire crew’s combined labor is done, they bathe head to toe, emerge onto the immaculate deck fresh as bridegrooms leaping from a Holland garden, pacing the planks in pairs and trios, joking about parlors, sofas, carpets, fine cambrics, proposing to mat the deck, hang curtains from the top, take tea by moonlight on the forecastle piazza. Mention oil, bone, or blubber to these musk-scented mariners, and it’s little short of audacity: they don’t know the thing you allude to. Away, bring napkins! But aloft at the three mastheads, three men stand watching for more whales, which will inevitably soil the clean oaken furniture, drop a grease spot somewhere. Many’s the time, after 96 hours of nonstop labor—rowing in the boats till their wrists swell, hauling chains at the windlass, cutting and slashing, smoked by equatorial sun and try-works fire, scrubbing the ship till it’s spotless as a dairy room—the poor fellows are just buttoning the clean necks of their frocks when the cry rings out: “There she blows!” and they fly off to fight another whale, going through the whole weary cycle again. Oh! this is man-killing, but this is life. Hardly have we mortals, by long toil, extracted the small, valuable sperm from the world’s vast bulk, hardly have we cleansed ourselves of its defilements and learned to live in clean tabernacles of the soul, when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and we sail off to fight another world, going through young life’s old routine again. Oh, metempsychosis! Oh, Pythagoras, who died bright and wise in Greece two thousand years ago—I sailed with you along the Peruvian coast last voyage, and foolish as I am, taught you, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!