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.
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.
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