Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

But why were English whalers like the Samuel Enderby so famously hospitable, passing round the beef, bread, can, and joke without tiring of eating, drinking, laughing? Ishmael traced the tradition to Dutch roots: the English were preceded in the whale fishery by Hollanders, Zealanders, and Danes, from whom they borrowed not only fishery terms, but their fat old fashions of plenty. English merchant ships scrimp their crews, but not English whalers; this good cheer is not natural to English whaling, but inherited, with a special origin. During his Leviathanic research, Ishmael stumbled on an ancient Low Dutch book, “Dan Coopman” by Fitz Swackhammer, which he thought was a cooper’s memoirs until his friend Dr. Snodhead, professor of Low Dutch and High German, translated it and found it was a merchant’s account of Dutch commerce, including a detailed chapter on the whale fishery. In that chapter, headed “Smeer” or “Fat,” Ishmael found a full inventory of provisions for a fleet of 180 Dutch whalers, which he transcribes here: 400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese (probably inferior). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of beer.

Most statistical tables are dry, but this one floods the reader with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and cheer. Ishmael spent three days digesting the numbers, which led to profound thoughts: with 30 men per ship, 180 ships, 5400 Dutch harpooneers in all, that works out to two barrels of beer per man for a twelve-week cruise, plus their fair share of 550 ankers of gin. He jokes that it seems improbable those fuddled men could stand in boat heads and take good aim at flying whales, but they did, and hit their marks; the beer agreed with them in the cold Polar fisheries, but on the equator it would make them sleepy at the masthead and boozy in their boats, to the loss of Nantucket and New Bedford. Enough is said to prove that old Dutch whalers of two or three centuries ago were high livers, and the English whalers did not neglect their example. As the English say, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the decanter.

CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.

Hitherto, Ishmael has chiefly dwelt on the marvels of the sperm whale’s outer aspect, or separate interior structural features, but to give a full, sweeping comprehension of the leviathan, he must unbutton him further still, untag his hose, unbuckle his garters, cast loose the hooks and eyes of his innermost joints, and set him before the reader in his ultimate, unconditional skeleton. A reasonable question arises: how does a mere oarsman in the fishery come to know so much of the whale’s subterranean parts? Did erudite Stubb mount his capstan to lecture on Cetacean anatomy, holding up a specimen rib for the crowd? Of course not. Ishmael cannot land a full-grown whale on deck to examine as a cook dishes a roast pig. He has been a witness to the whale’s outer life, but only Jonah has had the privilege of discoursing on the joists and beams, rafters and ridge-poles, the frame of leviathan, the tallow-vats and cheeseries of his bowels.

Ishmael confesses that few whalemen have ever penetrated far beneath the skin of an adult whale, but he was blessed with one small opportunity: on a ship he belonged to, a small cub sperm whale was once hoisted whole to the deck to have his poke or bag removed, for making sheaths for harpoon barbs and lance heads. Ishmael did not let that chance pass, using his boat-hatchet and jack-knife to break the seal and read all the contents of the young cub. For his exact knowledge of the full-grown whale’s bones, however, he is indebted to his late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. Years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, Ishmael was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with Tranquo at his retired palm villa at Pupella, a seaside glen not far from Bamboo-Town, the island’s capital. Tranquo, a man of devout love for all barbaric treasures, had collected in Pupella every rare thing his people could invent: carved wooden devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes, all distributed among the natural wonders the sea had cast upon his shores. Chief among these was a great sperm whale, dead and stranded after an unusually long raging gale, his head leaning against a coconut tree whose tufted droopings looked like his verdant jet. When the vast body was stripped of its fathom-deep blubber, and the bones dried in the sun, the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms was built to shelter it.

The ribs were hung with trophies, the vertebræ carved with strange Arsacidean hieroglyphic annals, the priests kept an unextinguished aromatic flame burning in the skull so the mystic head sent forth vapory spout once more, and the terrific lower jaw hung from a bough above all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that affrighted Damocles. It was a wondrous sight: the wood was green as Icy Glen mosses, trees stood haughty with living sap, the earth beneath was a weaver’s loom with a gorgeous carpet of ground-vine warp and woof, living flowers the figures. All the trees, shrubs, ferns, grasses, message-carrying air were ceaselessly active; through the leaf lacings, the great sun was a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Ishmael cried out to the unseen weaver: “Pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.”