Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.

When the crew dug deeper into the hold, they found the uppermost casks were sound, and the leak lay further down, so they kept breaking out tier after tier of ancient, corroded puncheons, until the piled decks were hard to navigate, and the hollow hull echoed underfoot like empty catacombs. It was during this backbreaking labor, stripping to his woollen drawers to haul the heavy casks in the damp, slimy dark of the lower hold, that poor Queequeg caught a terrible chill that turned to fever. For days he wasted away in his hammock, his cheekbones sharpening, his tattoos standing out on his thinning frame, until the crew had all but given him up. But his eyes, far from dimming, grew softer, fuller, rounding like the rings of eternity, holding a quiet, holy light that awed any man who sat by his side. When he called the cabin boy to him in the grey morning watch, he asked for a dark wooden canoe, like the ones used for dead whalemen in Nantucket, to be built for his body. He told them of his people’s custom: embalmed warriors are laid in canoes and set adrift to float to the starry archipelagoes, where the milky way is but the white breakers of the uncontinented seas that flow into the heavens. He shuddered at the thought of being sewn in his hammock and tossed to sharks; he would have a canoe, like a whale-boat without a keel, even if it steered uncertainly. The carpenter was sent for at once, and set to work on planks of dark, ancient wood cut from the aboriginal groves of the Lackaday isles. He took Queequeg’s measure with a ruler, chalking his torso and limbs as carefully as if he were building a sea-chest, while a Long Island sailor sighed, “Ah! poor fellow! he’ll have to die now.” The carpenter cut his notches in the workbench, planed the lid, and drove the last nail just as Queequeg’s hammock was carried forward. The crew tried to drive the coffin away, indignant at the omen, but Queequeg, tyrannical as all dying men are, commanded it be brought to him at once. He leaned over the edge of his hammock to examine it, then asked for his harpoon: the iron head was placed in the coffin with one of his boat paddles, biscuits lined the sides, a flask of fresh water set at his head, a bag of woody earth from the hold at his foot, a roll of sail-cloth for a pillow. He had his little god Yojo brought, crossed his arms over his chest with the idol between them, and ordered the lid placed over him. The headpiece turned on a leather hinge, and only his calm, composed face showed. “Rarmai,” he murmured. “It will do; it is easy.” He signed to be lifted back into his hammock, but not before Pip, who had been hovering nearby, drew close, sobbing, his tambourine in one hand, Queequeg’s hand in the other. “Poor rover! Will ye never have done with all this weary roving? Where go ye now? If the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s been missing long—I think he’s in those far Antilles. If ye find him, comfort him; for he must be very sad; look! he’s left his tambourine behind; I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I’ll beat ye your dying march.” Pip’s voice rose to a wild shriek as he was led away: “Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him! Ho, where’s his harpoon? Lay it across here. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Huzza! Oh for a game-cock to sit on his head and crow! Queequeg dies game! Mind ye that; Queequeg dies game! But base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a’shiver; out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he’s a runaway, a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat! I’d never beat my tambourine over base Pip and hail him General if he were once more dying here. No, no! Shame upon all cowards—shame upon them! Let ’em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!” Queequeg lay with closed eyes through it all, as if in a dream. But three days later, he rallied without warning: he’d remembered a small, unfinished duty ashore in his native island, he said, and could not die until it was done. When the crew expressed their surprise, he told them plainly that whether he lived or died was a matter of his own sovereign will; sickness could not kill him if he chose to live, only a whale, a gale, or some violent, ungovernable destroyer. Like all savages, his recovery was swift: in a few days he was sitting on the windlass eating with a vigorous appetite, and soon after he leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, stretched with a huge yawn, and sprang into the head of his hoisted boat, harpoon in hand, pronounced fit for duty. With a wild, whimsical turn, he turned his coffin into a sea-chest, filling it with his canvas clothes, and spent his spare hours carving the lid with grotesque figures copied from the tattoos that covered his body—tattoos written by a dead prophet of his island, a complete theory of the heavens and earth inscribed on his living flesh, a riddle even he could not read, destined to moulder away with his body. When Ahab saw him up and about one morning, he turned away with a bitter exclamation: “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”