Queequeg’s Sag Harbor Wheelbarrow and Rokovoko Wedding Punchbowl Anecdotes
Queequeg shares two humorous stories as they travel. The first describes his first encounter with a wheelbarrow in Sag Harbor, where the owners of his ship lent him one to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Despite knowing nothing about how to operate it, Queequeg placed his chest on the barrow, lashed it fast, and then simply shouldered the entire thing to march up the wharf. He then tells a second story about a proper ship captain who visited Rokovoko Island and was invited to his sister’s wedding feast. When the High Priest performed the ceremonial first dip into the wedding punchbowl before the blessed beverage could circulate, the punctilious captain—thinking himself superior to a mere island king in the king’s own house—coolly washed his hands in what he mistook for a finger bowl. The islanders found this misinterpretation highly amusing.
Boarding the Moss, Sailing the Acushnet River, and Reflections on New Bedford’s Whaling Industry
After paying passage and securing their luggage, they board the schooner Moss. As the vessel glides down the Acushnet River, New Bedford rises on one side in terraces of streets with ice-covered trees glittering in the cold air. The wharves are piled with enormous hills and mountains of casks, while whale ships lie silent and safely moored alongside others from which sounds of carpenters and coopers emerge, accompanied by the blended noises of fires and forges melting pitch. All of this betokens that new cruises are beginning, for when one perilous voyage ends, another immediately begins, and then another after that—an endless, eternal cycle of whaling effort.
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