Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.

The log and line, long unused and rotting from neglect, caught Ahab’s eye. He remembered his shattered quadrant and his oath to rely on the level log. The ship sailed plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots. “Forward, there! Heave the log!” The Manxman and the Tahitian took the reel. The Manxman warned that the line was spoilt by heat and wet, but Ahab mocked him, speaking of the Isle of Man and independent nations sucked in by fate. The log was heaved; the line straightened, then suddenly—snap! The overstrained line parted, and the log was gone.

“I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line,” Ahab muttered. “But Ahab can mend all.” As they hauled in the broken line, Pip’s mad voice was heard from the water. “Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing.” The mad boy had been holding onto the line, and the crew jeered at him. Ahab, moved by some strange chord, commanded that Pip be brought aboard. “Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.” The old Manxman muttered that two daft ones were about, one with strength and one with weakness, and suggested a new line altogether.

CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.

Steering south-eastward by Ahab’s steel and his new log-line, the Pequod held toward the Equator. The long passage through unfrequented waters, the monotony of trade winds, seemed a prelude to some desperate scene. Near the Equator, among rocky islets, a wild cry—like the ghosts of Herod’s Innocents—startled the watch. The Christians thought it mermaids; the pagans, unappalled; the old Manxman declared it the voices of newly drowned men. At sunrise a sailor went to his mast-head and fell—a falling phantom into the sea. The life-buoy cask, shrunken by the sun, sank after him. The first man to look out for the White Whale on the White Whale’s own ground was swallowed by the deep.

Starbuck was directed to replace the buoy, but no light cask could be found. In the feverish eagerness of the approaching crisis, all hands were impatient of any toil not directly connected with the final end. Queequeg hinted at his coffin. “A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck. Flask thought it practicable; the carpenter was ordered to rig it. The carpenter, a man of knotty Aroostook hemlock, protested inwardly against the “cobbling sort of business” but resolved to do it with pride. “I’ll have me thirty separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin.” He called for hammer, caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike.

CHAPTER 127. The Deck.

The coffin lay upon two line-tubs between the vice-bench and the open hatchway while the carpenter caulked its seams. Ahab came slowly from the cabin-gangway, Pip following. “Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently.” Ahab saw the coffin. “Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders.” Ahab looked at the carpenter. “Art thou not also the undertaker? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades. One day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins!” The carpenter said he did as he was bid. Ahab asked if he ever sang while working. “The grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?” The carpenter said his caulking mallet was full of music. Ahab mused that the coffin was the dreaded symbol of death made into the sign of help and hope. He told the carpenter to get the traps out of sight, then turned to Pip. “There’s that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like.” He led Pip back to his cabin, leaving the carpenter to mutter about old women and tinkers.